The U.S. Dismantling the International Criminal Court: International Law in the Cross-Hairs

The Rome statute, a treaty that went into effect in 2002, established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in order to bring accountability even to high officials of governments who flaunt international law by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of July 14, 2026, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the American high representative on foreign policy and diplomacy, announced the intent of the Trump administration to stop at nothing less than dismantling the ICC, the U.S. had not ratified the treaty and thus was not subject to the court’s jurisdiction. However, Americans on the soil of countries that had ratified the treaty could be arrested there and sent to the ICC in the Hague if charged with having violated international law abroad. Back on U.S. territory, any such culprits would be beyond the reach of the ICC and any of the governments that were obliged by treaty to make arrests on their respective soils to implement warrants issued by the ICC. I contend that U.S. sovereignty was neither diminished or threatened by the existence of the court and the governments obliged to implement the warrants. In fact, the Trump administration may have been acting as a proxy for a foreign regime, two high government officials (at least) had been charged by the ICC and yet were still flaunting their immunity in Israel and the United States. Protecting the accused in another country of such horrendous crimes as a holocaustic genocide and falsely claiming that the ICC was an existential threat to American sovereignty as Rubio claimed on social media are not in the best interests of the U.S. even just in terms of reputational (and political) capital in international relations. Political expediency geared to protecting culprits of such a severe crime is at the very least short-sighted. In steering a large ship, a captain should look beyond the bow, as per the fateful example of the Titanic in 1912 attests. Enlightened self-interest goes a long way, whereas a narrow, contractual self-interest is apt to be hit head-on at some point. In July of 2026, the E.U. warned the world of the reckless American steering, but like a drunk driver, full of hubris liquor, the warning would go unheeded in the Hobbesian ideological belief that there is no such thing as international law in the state of nature. The bigger picture considers whether international law itself would survive the collapse of the post-World-War-II world order, which includes the ICC as well as the enforcement-impotent United Nations even concerning its own rulings and votes! Such self-inflicted impotence evinces Nietzsche’s conception of weakness, which is epitomized by celibate priests who yet seek to dominate even the strong. Netanyahu and Putin could easily flaunt the U.N. and be confident in remaining untouched by the ICC and even the feckless governments that were obliged to enforce the court’s arrest warrants. The global order was backsliding ironically as progress in technology was revolutionizing daily life in the twenty-first century.

In a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2026, “Rubio vowed to ‘dismantle’ the court, claiming it posed ‘an intolerable threat to US sovereignty.”[1] He viewed the court and its supporters in other governments to be, as he put it, “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts and the force of so-called international law.”[2] In other words, the court, he claimed, was hardly neutral, as it was very partisan in being anti-American and was determined to eviscerate U.S. sovereignty from the face of the Earth.

Perhaps New York City Mayor Mamdani’s recent threat that he would have the Israeli security minister Ben-Gvir arrested and sent to the ICC in the event of the Israeli official stepping foot on NYC soil, and the related political-monetary power in Washington, D.C. of the AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) had something to do with motivating the Trump Administration to launch its full-blown attack on the ICC, for the claim that the ICC had or even could impinge on U.S. sovereignty even though the United States had not ratified the Rome statute and thus was not subject to the court is wholly without validity or merit. Accordingly, Rubio’s claim that the ICC “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system” can be dismissed as propaganda intended to protect top Israeli officials from being held accountable for having ordered a genocide in Gaza even though the occupation itself violated international law, if there actually was such a thing.

To be sure, the American high representative for foreign policy was no idiot. A clue to his rationale, albeit flawed, lies in the U.S. State Department’s statement that the U.S. Government would “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.”[3] The key lies in the targeting of American servicemen or officials. Because “Americans never signed up for this, and all American presidents since the ICC’s ratification have maintained that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Americans,” the ICC’s claim to having “the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest” is invalid.[4] The key here is operating on behalf of, for such language alludes to Americans operating abroad, and thus possibly in countries that were subject to the ICC at the time and thus were obligated by the Rome statute to make arrests on their own soil to implement outstanding ICC warrants. The particular nationality of a foreigner in one of those countries does not matter on whether one can be arrested there; the reach of a foreigner’s home government does not extend so to exempt citizens from arrest; for that would be in violation of another country’s sovereignty. Neither is the more subjective “national interest” of the U.S. sovereign in other countries, which are not even subject to U.S. law.

Rubio is simply incorrect in asserting that ICC-based arrests in countries treatied to the Rome statute threaten “every aspect of our political and legal system” even though the ICC at the time did have jurisdiction over Americans who were (operating) in such other countries (excluding being physically inside a U.S. embassy, which is considered U.S. territory). Because the U.S. had not ratified the treaty, anyone on American soil could not be touched either by the ICC itself or any of the governments obliged to implement ICC warrants on their own respective territories, so the American political and legal system were not in danger of being torpedoed by the court.

In fact, the State Department’s statement’s threat to increase scrutiny of countries “that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance”—meaning that such assistance would be terminatedcan—can be interpreted as a lack of respect or even recognition of the national sovereignty of other countries; at the very least, the U.S. Government was announcing its intent to manipulate other governments even though they were treaty-bound to recognize and enforce ICC arrest-warrants.[5] The sordid nature of the motivation of the Trump administration may go even deeper than encroachment, which was not exactly a new tactic with respect to pressuring and even threatening other governments to do the bidding of the U.S. Government.

Kenneth Roth, formerly with Human Rights Watch, wrote at the time that the Trump administration wanted “to be able to commit war crimes with impunity even on the territory of governments that have joined the International Criminal Court.”[6] Given the support of Israel amid its genocide in Gaza, allies being able to commit even crimes against humanity, which go beyond war crimes, can be added, at least as a possible motivation. Roth, however, saw in Rubio’s position a “quest for impunity for American war crimes abroad” using national sovereignty as a subterfuge to hide his true intent.[7] Ironically, according to Roth, Rubio was ignoring “the sovereign right of other nations to invoke the ICC for crimes committed on their territory.”[8] Not only is American sovereignty unperturbed by ICC arrests made in other countries, as they are not subject to U.S. sovereignty or even American “national interests,” but also those countries are well within their national sovereignty to arrest foreigners on their soil even on warrants issued by the ICC, provided that the country had ratified the Rome statute.

Imagine the Japanese government protesting to the U.S. Government regarding the arrest of a Japanese citizen in New York City who has just unsuccessfully set off a means by which thousands of people would be killed. Certainly Japan would not even attempt to claim that the arrest violates Japan’s sovereignty, because New York (and U.S.) sovereignty, not that of Japan, apply in New York City. The American federal system, like that of the E.U., had governmental sovereignty at both the federal and state levels, with direct effect of both rather than just through the state governments. The claim that Japanese sovereignty trumps either in New York City could not seriously be considered as credible by anyone, and yet Rubio’s piece and the State Department’s statement were taken seriously enough by the E.U. for it to issue a warning against the position against the ICC in Washington. The adage, the emperor is not wearing any clothes, seems to apply well here, and yet high governmental position itself seems to come with the assumption of being fully clothed.

So much for the American case for dismantling the ICC. Hardly noticeable in Rubio’s op-ed in the newspaper, but perhaps the most important part of the piece, is his reference to “so-called international law.”[9] Did you catch that in the quote above? If not, you missed the larger, and much more significant claim by the U.S. Secretary of State that international law is, at best, a misnomer without any actual referent. Overlooking the truly significant in being captivated instead with a political “dog-fight” may be a human proclivity that is hard-wired in our nature, but we also have the ability to reason and reflect, and even to pick out the truly significant even amid sensationalism that titillates our emotions. If I am right, very few people indeed picked up on Rubio’s ideological position on international law itself. He was indicating by the inclusion of “so-called” that nothing that can be called law exists beyond the sovereignty of a country.

Relatedly, Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that rights, except that of self-preservation, are conditional on there being a sovereign power. Arguably, Russia’s Putin in Ukraine, Israel’s Netanyahu in Gaza (and even the settlers in the West Bank), and even America’s Trump (and Israel’s Netanyahu) tossing bombs into Iran evinces a refusal to recognize the validity of international law. What counts is national power in political realism; not even international norms can or should get in the way of governments single-handedly advancing the strategic interests of their respective countries. This is tantamount to a return to Hobbes’ state of nature, internationally.

In a world in which governments have and have exclusive control over nuclear weapons, nature can indeed be nasty, brutish, and short. Furthermore, the lack of any respected international “requirements” to limit carbon emissions could also be expected to push the planet beyond even the inhabitable zone of humans, as the 2021 film, Silent Night, suggests. More immediately, however, draught, flooding, heatwaves, and even sub-optimal food production (and thus starvation, as in Africa) could be expected as governments continued to ignore the voluntary targets set in the Paris Accords even as the species’ global population continued to increase at an annual rate estimated by the UN of roughly 0.8% to 0.9% when the population stood (in July, 2026) at approximately 8.3 billion. Just a century before, that figure was estimated to be between 1.75 billion and 1.93 billion. The exponential growth rate itself may suggest that humanity was out of control with respect to its population on Earth, given its natural resources and ecosystems. According to Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a maximizing, schizogenic, variable can pierce the equilibrium, homoeostatic, steady-state of an ecosystem, and even the Earth’s atmosphere itself. Our species had become such a variable amid the economic engine of commercial revolution, which gave rise to climate change, as industry greatly expanded during the twentieth century. Even so, the Paris Accords were voluntary, given the value (and priority) put on national sovereignty.

An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus, interestingly known both as a political economist (whereas Adam Smith had been known as moral philosopher!) and Christian clergyman, predicts dire consequences from a species failing to restrain its own population growth but being hemmed in by nature through starvation, war, and disease. Indeed, the Romantic period of intellectual history in the 1800s would see nature portrayed even in Turner’s paintings as having the last word over the classics steeped in reason and human intentionality.

Therefore, both with respect to nuclear war and climate change, both of have their basis at a time when national sovereignty was still absolute and nationalism was so in vogue, especially in Europe, international relations in the twenty-first century could not afford to be based on and confined to the sovereignty of individual countries. Rubio’s political stance on the very existence of international law even as a concept is therefore dangerous, and at the very least is not in line with the sapiens in homo sapiens, for sapiens, sapientis is the form of the Latin adjective, wise. Dismantling the ICC, and thus giving impunity a free hand in war crimes and crimes against humanity, is a move in the direction of Hobbes’ state of nature, in which everyone lives in fear of being killed.

Perhaps in a Hegelian-modified way of looking at the broad expanse of human freedom and responsibility through history, our species is perhaps hardwired, or habituated, to taking a step back after having taken a step forward, before being willing to take yet another step forward. Putin, Netanyahu, and even Trump can be viewed as representing a step back, in aggressive fear, but this too shall perhaps pass, hopefully before humanity obliterates or exterminates itself. But lest we rest too assured that a new, stronger, and thus better enforced international order of institutions arise like a phoenix from the ashes of the fire being set by the Trump administration, a well as those set by Russia’s Putin in Ukraine and Israel’s Netanyahu in Gaza and even the West Bank (by refusing to hold violent settlers accountable), Kant’s claim that world peace would only be possible, but not probably, were a world federation, presumably with enough governmental sovereignty of its own, albeit with checks and balances to obviate tyranny, to enforce its laws on governments that have abused their national sovereignty that has been retained. A world federation wherein all sovereignty resides in the national governments, a non-plena federation in the Latin of Althusius’s early seventeenth-century theory of federalism based on the Holy Roman Empire, would be an exercise in futility and thus not worth even attempting, as already demonstrated for the world by the conduct over many decades since World War II of the veto-wielding powers on the UN Security Council at the expense of the very credibility of that international organization. Indeed, the decimated credibility played right into Rubio’s coded allusion to international law being not worthy of the label. Therefore, what might a real global order look like, once the full step back has run its course?  

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1. Emma De Ruiter and Gavin Blackburn, “EU Says Threats Against ICC ‘Unacceptable’ as US Launches Campaign to ‘Dismantle’ Court,” Euronews.com, 14 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

COP30: Is Symbolism Enough Amid Climate-Change?

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

The full essay is at "COP30." 

Worse than Hell on Earth: Gaza

Each of us is so close to human nature that our perception of it may be blurry or partial. One of Freud’s contributions is the insight that we don’t even know ourselves completely, given the existence of the subconscious. This is also true of trying to comprehend human nature at a distance, as whether humanity is or is not by nature compassionate to people who are suffering greatly at a distance. The sheer duration of the extreme suffering of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza in the midst of ongoing military attacks by Russia and Israel, respectively, beginning in the early 2020s, and the sheer impunity absent any interventionist coalitions of countries from around the world combine to give a negative verdict on human nature concerning compassion from a distance. It can even be said that the ongoing passive complicity around the world impugns not only us, but human nature itself. While less explicit than in furnishing weapons to Russia or Israel, the complicity of human nature is more serious, for even as geopolitics change, human nature is static, at least in a non-evolutionary timespan. Given the extreme suffering in Gaza in particular, the lack of political will around the world to step in militarily and assume control of Gaza may mean that human nature itself is worse than hell on earth.

The director of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, claimed in early June, 2025 that “humanity is failing” as it has collectively “watched the horrors” of the Israeli offensive that had rendered conditions in Gaza worse than hell on earth.[1] Given the leveling of towns and cities and the deliberate blocking of food and medical supplies for months even as 1.2 million residents could not leave the territory allegedly to make life untenable so the population would be exterminated, it is easy to heap blame on the Israeli officials for going too far in exacting revenge for the Hamas attack in which only 1,200 were killed and a few hundred Israelis were taken hostage. The fallacy, or excuse, of collective justice plus allowing the victims to exact it is a damning indictment on the Israeli government and even the state of Israel as deserving sovereignty. Such a verdict is easily made; it is much more difficult to turn a negative verdict on the rest of us as we and our respective governments around the world have passively refused to step in militarily.

“It has become worse,” Spoljaric said. “We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering. More importantly, the fact that we are watching a people entirely stripped of its human dignity. It should really shock our collective conscience.”[2] I think it has, so the question is why there is such a gap between being shocked morally and deciding to take action and then actually doing so.

The International Red Cross is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions, which is the corpus of international law that regulates the conduct of war and is designed to protect civilians. The most recent version, the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, was adopted after the Second World War with the intention of preventing the killing of civilians “from happening again.”[3] This is of course an allusion to Nazi Germany, which had killed roughly 20 million Slavs in Eastern Europe and millions more, including Jews from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary westward. Ironically, Adolf Eichmann, who had managed the trains to and from the death camps, was convicted by an Israeli court because he had ignored Himmler’s direct order NOT to force Hungarian Jews to walk to a death camp in Poland; Eichmann could not claim that he was just following orders, and this is how he lost the case and his life.

As uncomfortable as it must be for Israeli officials to be likened to Nazi officials, the discomfort of the rest of us in being confronted with the verdict of our own passive complicity or at least our refusal to act on the basis of shocked conscience is surely much less. I suspect most of us reflect on the negative verdict on human nature as if reading a weather forecast of rain ahead. I contend that we are alienated from our own nature as a species, and that support for this and our lack of humane discomfort from having remained passive bystanders willing at most to go to a political protest is in the sheer impunity that both Putin and Netanyahu have been able to leverage in their respective one-sided military invasions.

If the dire verdict of our sordid human nature, which none of us can escape, is reasonable, then perhaps the question of whether our species deserves not to go extinct from the species-induced climate disequilibrium (i.e., the warming, over all, of the planet) can be revisited. Prior to 2022, and especially during the Coronavirus global pandemic, we could forgive our collective species for having polluted as if there were no tomorrow—that our penchant for instant gratification and outright greed are not enough to warrant extinction as if it were a divine punishment like Noah’s flood. After 2022, however, our calculous could be different—more dire for our species being worthy of survival from its self-induced and perpetuated ongoing and uncorrected climate crisis. The refusal of even democratic governments around the world to jointly step in as over a million residents of Gaza had reached a living condition worse than hell on earth is arguably morally worse than having refused to regulate carbon emissions sufficiently and then take drastic measures when the global average temperature reached 1.5C degrees. Leaving governments to enforce the Paris Agreement of 2016 themselves is bad enough; standing by while reports of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians, including babies, as a pastime and leveling even cities is much more unethical because of the extremity and scale of the human suffering. That even such a verdict being made explicit would not make any difference in practicality is a foregone conclusion that only confirms the sordid verdict. It is not as if no wiggle-room is in human nature, or that life is entirely deterministic, so we are indeed culpable both as individuals and as a species rather than being victims of our own innate nature. 

As sordid as selfishness is, even what Jonathan Edwards calls “compound self-love,” in which benefits are extended to other people rather than only to oneself, is not sufficient to save us from the damning verdict. As a Christian theologian in the eighteenth century, Edwards maintained that because God is love (ultimately of being in general assenting to being, and thus to us in so far as we exist), divine love, or agape, is ultimately unconditional. Yet from our limited vantage point, it is useful to wonder why a perfect being would love such a species as looks the other way as a people face worse than hell on earth on an ongoing basis. It is easy enough to believe that Yahweh will punish Israel for incessantly disobeying the Commandment against (mass) murder; it is much more difficult to come up with a rationale as to why God should love the rest of us even though God is love and thus cannot be otherwise. We most certainly can be otherwise. The question may ultimately be whether our species is worth being loved even by unconditional love itself.

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1. Jeremy Bowen, “Gaza Now Worse than Hell on Earth, Humanitarian Chief Tells BBC,” BBC.com, June 4, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

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."

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.

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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.

Facing a Hot and Hostile Planet

On October 24, 2024, Tjada McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, and formerly in the Obama administration working on global hunger, spoke at Harvard on wars, hunger, and climate change then going on around the world. The pandemic had been a setback. In a world of pandemics, climate change, war, and hunger, there is no us and them. Lest this utopia be taken too realistically, 200,000 more people worldwide were hungry after the pandemic than before it. Since 1946, the highest number of state conflicts was in 2023. It was then that Russia invaded Ukraine and Israel decimated much of Gaza. In 2024, the UN’s high court found both aggressors to be violating international law, but they continued undeterred and with impunity. In the context of an epic crisis of displacement of civilians, with 339 million people globally having to rely on humanitarian assistance in 2024, the impacts of climate change exacerbated hunger and conflict in several states, especially in Africa. I contend that a serious obstacle was systemic, specifically in an antiquated global order relying on an absolutist interpretation of the sovereignty of the nation-state. Even the E.U. was not immune.

In her talk, McKenna said that decades of conflicts on land-access in Africa had been made worse by the impacts of climate change.  By 2024, there had been four failed rainy seasons in Somalia. In northern Kenya, similarly occurring droughts followed by heavier rains causing flooding exacerbated hunger.  Progress against hunger and diseases such as polio had been made prior the pandemic, but even so, 2023-2024 could be characterized as a time of catch-up in terms of global humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, voters worldwide in 2024 were most concerned then about increasing cost of living around the world. France and Germany decreased the global aid budgets in 2024, though I contend that focusing on E.U. states without considering the humanitarian spending at the federal level had by 2024 become  incomplete as well as antiquainted. Russia, by the way, was paying Moldovan voters and feeding them disinformation so to sabatoge Moldova in gaining statehood in the European Union while political opposition to supporting Ukraine's military was building in the United States. In short, politics was staying pretty close to immediate self-interest.

Therefore, the international system based on nations acting alone in self-interest (i.e., political realism) was not enough to address the global problems of political manipulation, climate and conflict. The U.S. Congress had dedicated $1.1 billion to preventing conflict around the world in 2019, but this was just a drop in the bucket. "A recommitment to international law and the international criminal court worldwide is necessary," she said in closing.

Thus far, I have presented McKenna’s views, albeit with a few caveats from myself. I submit that the talk was not utopian, for McKenna was hardly optimistic concerning countries taking on militaristic aggressors whether unilaterally or through global institutions, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. “Conditions are right for bad actors,” she said, by which we might think of Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel in going too far with impunity internationally. McKenna said the world order was cracking, especially in terms of accountability. Unabashed optimism would not be appropriate, given the failures globally in 2023 and 2024 to hold Russia and Israel accountable and stop the wholesale and deliberate militaristic attacks against civilians. 

Nor was McKenna at all optimistic on a system based on sovereign nation-states mitigating climate change. A record amount of carbon emissions by humans in 2023 had made a mockery of a global approach that relies on voluntary targets, the very notion of which presupposes the absolutist version of governmental sovereignty being applied to each nation-state. I would simply add to McKenna’s lecture more of an emphasis on the need globally to reform or reconstruct the global order, such that national sovereignty would no longer be the basis, given that inherently global exigencies had already rendered the post World War II world order deficient and obsolete. 

On International Multilateralism: A Harsh Verdict on the UN by a Former Undersecretary

Speaking at Harvard in late September, 2024, Noeleen Heyzer, a former undersecretary of the UN, related the need for multilateral governance internationally to the need for the UN to evolve. The UN Charter created a system in which both large and small nations would be held accountable to international law: a rule-based order. This would protect the weak from the strong. Yet the Security Council has been unable to end wars. The UN is, according to Heyzer, “severely weakened,” so “(t)he strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Peaceful coexistence that rectifies power imbalances was at the time sorely lacking in Ukraine and Gaza. National vetoes in the Security Council were inflicting much damage on the UN's ability to respond. The implications for the UN, she admitted to me after her talk, are not at all good even concerning whether the international organization can reform itself sufficiently to rise out of abject failure.

Four global problems demonstrate the weakness of the United Nations as a multilateral institution by which countries can be held accountable. The UN’s response to the Covid virus pandemic was slow, and entirely in effective in getting China to share vital information with the world as the disease spread. China’s national interest—and the “face-saving” cultural reflex—was a threat to the interests of the global commons—the public health of the species, which should outweigh national interests even if not every national government is convinced. The climate crisis has demonstrated that binding multilateral governance has become necessary in part because of the growing power of MNCs, which are oriented to short-term profit and pushing costs to society (i.e., externalities.[1] Cybersecurity against hackers from abroad also demonstrates that the rule of law is needed internationally. Lastly, international security, which was severely compromised by the 55 conflicts going on in 2024, demonstrates just how damaging the national vetoes in the Security Council can be to international peace. The US invasion of Iraq, Russia of Ukraine, and Israel in Gaza leave us with the unhappy conclusion that no enforcement mechanism for international law exists. Impunity has been blatant, such that international law itself risks being utterly discredited. Ignoring international law and the use of national vetoes by allies of belligerent countries preempt international law, resulting in a heightened sense of unfairness globally.

Put in place in 1945, “(t)he current international system is out of date," she said. "We face a breakdown or breakthrough. Collective rethinking to make anther historical pivot is needed," she added. Diffusion of power has occurred since the UN’s founding. Fifty-one countries were initially in the UN. By 2024, the figure had reached 193 countries as members of the international organization. “The UN needs to evolve to reflect the shift in global power from the unipolar world of the US to a multipolar world,” she said. Global stakeholders include non-state actors; they should be included, she advocated streneously. “Solidarity is an act of enlightened self-interest,” she said. 

She reported that the UN was fundamentally rethinking how it could evolve to fit the reality of the twenty-first century.  A shift from a state-centric approach to one that engages diverse actors outside of the UN was needed, she argued, to protect our global commons. Economic inequality and social injustice undercut global stability, and thus should be emphasized more in the UN, she argued, as it evolves in the future. She emphasized throughout her talk that the UN should assume more of a role in rectifying economic inequality and patriarchy in countries that are members of the UN.

Thus far, I have briefly sketched Heyzer’s argument. I turn now to critiquing it. Although addressing economic inequality was a leitmotif in her talk, she said nothing of the impact of the UN’s humanitarian work around the world in alleviating economic inequality. To be sure, that humanitarian work has been a benefit to the species, especially in terms of food and disease, and the organization’s ideals too are of value, but I contend that neither saves the organization from the verdict, which I share with Heyzer, that the UN has failed overall.

Most significantly, a vague reference to the General Assembly working on how the UN could evolve does not reflect the severity of the impotence of the Security Council and the General Assembly in regard to restraining national interests that compromise or even eviscerate collective action on the four major problems discussed above. The countries having vetoes in the Security Council cannot be expected to willingly give up their respective vetoes. Political realism says as much. So, it is difficult to see how the major problem in the UN could be solved short of the non-veto members forming a new international organization—a substitute for the UN sans vetoes.

Even such a solution leaves the impotence in enforcement untouched. Putin in Russia and Netanyahu in Israel beginning in 2023 highlight the need for international law to “have teeth” (i.e., have credible enforcement mechanisms). By this I mean something more than mere embargoes, as those of the E.U. and U.S. against Russia in 2024 demonstrate just how difficult it is for embargoes to have sufficient economic impact to result in political/militaristic change in the embargoed country. I submit that vesting UN troops with more authority in using force to stop countries like Israel and Russia within their respective sovereignties geographically would be necessary for international law to be able to live up to the name of law. Theoretically, if international law is indeed law, then political realism should include the strategic interests not just of countries, but also whatever international organization(s) promulgate and presumably enforce international law.  

After her talk, I spoke with Heyzer to present my critique, which I said I would publish. She agreed with me that the veto powers on the Security Council would not agree to unilaterally give up their respective vetoes, so the non-veto countries of the UN would have to form another international organization sans vetoes, which the veto-holding countries of the UN could join. By implication, the discussions then underway in the General Assembly to reform the UN can be viewed as superficial rather than as serious attempts to reform the UN out of its paralysis in promulgating international law. She also agreed with me that without going further to address the impotence in enforcing the UN resolutions on the UN’s willful countries that violate UN resolutions doubtless with a sense of impunity, even a non-veto substitute organization would not be a viable solution unless viable enforcement mechanisms “with teeth” could be formulated and implemented. I suggested to Heyzer that in addition to not permitting the most powerful countries to wield veto-power in the Security Council, which would not improve enforcement, the UN troops would need additional authority to literally push back or arrest countries that violate UN resolutions or verdicts of the UN’s court by invading other members other than in self-defense. She did not reply to my suggestion itself, which likely means that she did not agree with it. Instead, she said, “creative thinking is needed.” I agreed wholeheartedly, and pointed out that even though our species has developed technology and economically both in terms of fiscal and monetary policy, having learned lessons from the Great Depression so another would not occur in the financial crisis of 2008, there has not been much in the way of political development since the Enlightenment. Heyzer agreed with me on this point, and that a burst of thinking was needed in 2024 due to the four emergent threats to our collective interests internationally discussed above. As I have already stated, she said the following crucial sentence during her talk: “Collective rethinking to make another historical pivot is needed.” I submit that such a pivot would go beyond, though be related to, merely voiding the vetoes and creating a mechanism of enforcement at the extant UN. Deep political principles are reexamined and shifted around for there to be a fundamental change sufficient to constitute a historical pivot.  

Climate change alone demonstrates that continuing with the principle of absolutist national sovereignty at the expense of multilateral international governance is nothing short of foolish. Continuing to rely on the UN to address the four pressing and dire problems impinging on international relations even though the consensus is surely that the UN itself has failed in its principal missions reflects very badly on humanity in its cognitive functioning. The lack of any significant public discourse on the need for a replacement for the UN is itself a red flag, or indication that our species is akin to race horses wearing blinders. Unlike the horses, we can take ours off. I don’t believe the problem is that we have hit the ceiling of the human brain’s ability to think; rather, too many people, even among the political and economic elites, have been giving things exogenous to thinking, such as ideology, stubbornness, and sheer complacency, too much weight in being able to distort or even displace reason.  

I submit that it is telling that a former undersecretary of the UN admitted that a substitute organization would be necessary—that a former high-ranking UN official has come to the unhappy conclusion that the UN is not able to adequately reform itself, given the hegemony of the veto-wielding member-countries (which are not member-states, as some reporters erroneously claim, since the UN is an international organization rather than a federal government). The implications are indeed dire for the UN.

Simply put, unless or until another international organization or government is established for multilateral international relations funneled by an institutional structure and procedures, the international arena will continue to instantiate the state of nature. Ultimately, the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty must give way for multilateral international relations to rise from the barbaric state of nature. Although the UN’s ideals were still of value as late as 2024, it can be argued that the UN itself had dropped to the status of a dead corps still twitching, as evinced by the sheer dismissive impunity of Russia and Israel as they both ravaged exogenous territories not permitted by the UN, which also had no ability to constrain countries violating the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions. If the UN had become impotent in preventing or stopping war and in literally saving the species from possible extinction (not to mention saving coastal cities around the world), is this not a stark indication that the international organization had failed and thus that a substitute or alternative was already warranted?

That an organization that was so clearly failing would continue nonetheless to function as if it were viable and be treated as such by national leaders points to a basic flaw in the human brain. To act as if and not even cognitively recognize that the route is futile goes beyond cognitive dissidence as a mental error. The lack of any public discourse on replacing the UN after Putin and Netanyahu had so easily dismissed strictures set by the UN is itself problematic. If someone tells people not to cross a line in the sand and yet they do anyway, and with impunity, to treat the teller as at all credible is nothing short of pathological.

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1. In the case of democracies, governments have an electoral interest in increasing GNP even by refusing to constrain fossil fuel extraction, refining, and consumption. Autocracies have a cash-flow interest in maximizing exports, which may include oil and conventional vehicles. During its invasion of Ukraine, Russia sent its embargoed oil through Saudi Arabia and India, which were then able to sell the oil to the West without disclosing the source.

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.