During times of global peace,
it is easy to suppose that increased economic interdependency between countries
reduce the likelihood of war due to the ramifications on the business projects.
By a similar logic by analogy, a couple could suppose that by getting married, the
increased interdependence would make breaking up more difficult, and thus less
likely. What is overlooked here is that emotions, whether in a romantic
relationship or between governments, can, if allowed to go unchecked, break
through the parchment barriers that we set up as if they could constrain even
intense, ongoing emotions. A couple using marriage as a substitute for going to
couples-counseling could actually make a break-up more likely once in
the marriage. Similarly, peace abroad and domestic tranquility can be thwarted
by international real-estate development projects themselves. Such a situation
was unfolding in Albania in mid-2026.
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 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.
In analyzing a merger, incorporating the macro context is vital. For very large mergers, for instance, public policy concerns inevitably surface even if they are typically ignored not only in merger analyses, but also by in societal and even governmental public discourse. Analysis at this level takes a societal standpoint, including on the relationship of business and government. This does not diminish the salience of firm-level analysis, for even how the respective organizational cultures would mesh is very important to a functional merged company. This is even true regarding the respective business-ethics climates, for it is not a given that a healthy organizational culture dominates an unethical one.
A study published in late November 2012 in the journal Science estimates that the melting of
ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland had raised global sea levels by 11.1
millimeters (0.43 inch) since 1992. That represents one-fifth of the total
sea-level rise increase in that period. Other contributors include the
expansion of the sea water from warming, and the melting of glaciers, as for
instance on mountains. In the 1990's, melting of the polar ice sheets in the
Antarctica and Greenland was responsible for about 10 percent of the global
sea-level rise, but by 2012 the effect had risen to 30 percent.[1]
The study does not, however, uncover the underlying cause, or association,
lying in a complexity in human nature itself. Our species has vaunted to the
top of the food chain and leveraged a brain capable of engineering
technological advances that would have seemed magical even just in the
nineteenth century, and yet we seem hard-wired to accelerate our course to a
self-destructive extinction. This lack of balance is reflected in the
increasing extremes in the global climate. In this essay, I begin with the
study and steadily work toward uncovering the underlying, subterranean culprit, which would go on to produce record-high carbon-emissions in 2017.
According to the New York Times in 2012,
the Chinese had become increasingly willing “to take to the streets despite the
perils of openly challenging the country’s authoritarian government.” Even more
surprising, government officials had actually acquiesced in some notable cases.
Given the raw nature of power, particularly under authoritarian auspices,
revolution rather than gradual reform may still be the most likely means by
which democracy can bloom under the golden, albeit hazy, sun. The full essay is at "Chemical Pollution in China."
Pope Francis declared to more
than 100 world leaders and diplomats at the United Nations in late September
2015 that a "right of the environment" exists and that our species
has no authority to abuse it or render it unfit for human habitation.[1] In stressing that urgent action is needed to
halt the destruction of God's creation, he made explicit reference to a
religious basis for his moral claim. He said the universe is the result of a
"loving decision by the creator, who permits man respectfully to use
creation for the good of his fellow men and for the glory of the creator: He is
not authorized to abuse it, much less destroy it."[2]
This statement may overplay both the religious nature of the basis and the
destruction. I turn now to parsing the statement in three parts, after which I
will supply the basis of the pope’s religious rationale, which is narrower than
he suggested in his speech.
California water regulators proposed a record $1.5 million
fine on July 21, 2015 against the Byron Bethany Irrigation District (BBID) in
the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The agency claimed that the district
had defied cutbacks that the California Water Resources Control Board had
ordered by diverting water from June 13 through June 25. The complaint said
that Byron Bethany had consumed an estimated 2,056 acre-feet of water[1]
in spite of the fact that the agency had imposed a 25 percent mandatory cutback
in urban water use and cuts to major agricultural interests.[2] I contend not only
that the district’s board put the interest of a part ahead of the good of the
whole (i.e., the common good), but also that the board did so out of a sense of
entitlement based on the sheer longevity of the water rights in the district.
As California faced
its fourth year of an extreme drought in 2015, Californians could have done
worse than look at Israel’s ten-year completed effort to desalinate
Mediterranean seawater and recycle wastewater. The sustained investments provided Israel
“with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts.”[1]
If only California’s officials could say the same. Rather than deprive the
Israelis of the opportunity to instruct the Californians, I want to point to
the subtle role of basis-of-comparison as undermining the California end.
Lake Mead, a reservoir outside Las Vegas serving 40 million
people in Nevada, Arizona, Southern California, and Northern Mexico, was at its
lowest level (i.e., below 1,080 feet) in April 2015 since it was formed with
the Hoover Dam.[1] Particularly
for California, whose snow-melt would again be minimal, the continued draught
was quickly turning dire. With a surplus of rain-water coming down on western
Washington and Oregon, the U.S. Government could have dusted off FDR’s Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC) to activate the long-term unemployed (and the
imprisoned) to assist the Army’s Corps of Engineers in constructing aqueducts
and digging canals that would hook up with the extant canals running from the
delta area north of Sacramento to southern California. It is not as though the
Oregonians and Washingtonians would miss the water, and the Californian farmers
could see to it that their best produce finds itself up north. Yet as easy as
such a large-scale governmental project seems, the devil is in the details,
which can actually be rather huge in themselves. China provides a useful case
study that the Americans could, conceivably at least, benefit from—should they
endeavor on a truly large-scale governmental project.
With the winter of 2014-2015 failing to deliver much of a
snowpack to California, Californians entered a fourth year of drought. The
measurement on March 3rd of the snowpack was the water equivalent of
five inches, or 19% of the average for that date.[1]
The drought’s extension ran counter to the conventional wisdom that droughts
last three years in California. Such “wisdom” is problematic not only for its
specific content in this case, but also because of the underlying presumption
of epistemological infallibility. Ok, I’ll unpack this bit of creative
verbosity. Without being aware of it, we tend to assume that we can’t be wrong
about things we have not studied. In fact, we even dismiss the knowledge of
those who are learned in a given subject in favor of our own belief that we
can’t be wrong about what we suppose we know. This tendency of the human brain
gets our species in a lot of trouble, yet we as a species are nearly blind to underlying
drought.
With China and the U.S. coming to an agreement in 2014 on
limiting their respective greenhouse-gas emissions, the Peru talks suddenly
gained new momentum toward a deal on a global scale. To be sure, even the
U.S.-China agreement would not kick in for years, if not decades, and a global
agreement would not even take effect until 2020 at the earliest. This drawback
may pale in comparison to one of nature’s own contributions to greenhouse-gas
emissions, and nature itself cannot agree to voluntarily restrict its own
output. Accordingly, we should not assume that a global agreement will save the
day, rendering the planet still inhabitable for humans in the next century.
With California entering its fourth year of severe drought
and the planet having its warmest August and September since records began in
1880, one scientist at NASA’s Institute for Space Studies said in 2014 that the
warm data points “point toward the long-term trends.”[1]
At the time, scientists were already claiming that the planet had entered a new
era—that of the Anthropocene—noted for the impact of the homo sapiens species
in altering Earth. The implications are profound, even if the huge shift has
not fully registered in human consciousness.
“Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” says Thomas F. Stocker, co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sponsored group of scientists who presented their rather definitive report on September 27, 2013. “In short,” Stocker observed, the anticipated change “threatens our planet, our only home.”[1] Not only are the stakes painfully high; human nature itself must come through, perhaps beyond its very nature, for homo sapiens species to make it through the twenty-second century.
The natural human proclivity to seek a (schizogenic) maximum rather than be content with sustaining an equilibrium steady-state had been all too evident in production management alone during the industrial revolution. So too was the human approbation of instant gratification, including attempts to obviate the costs incurred. Accordingly, the 2013 report provides the rather unwelcome news that “(h)uman influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes.”[2]
The red and purple areas saw increases in avg. temps. Image Source: IPCC
In fact, the report claims, “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”[3] Reflecting advances in the science (e.g., the models), the report “finds a 95 to 100 percent chance that most of the warming of recent decades is human-caused, up from the 90 to 100 percent chance cited in the last report, in 2007.”[4] Even as the confidence in these findings is improved by 5 percent, such clarified empirical knowledge does not necessarily translate into a brighter future.
The likely consequences, according to the report, is a range of potential warming of between 2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, should the carbon dioxide level double from the amount in already in the atmosphere in 2013. According to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in the E.U. the 2013 report is more conservative in its underlying assumptions than the previous report in 2007.
“To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the level of preindustrial times, . . . no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere,” according to the 2013 report.[5] Just over half that amount had already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at the rate energy consumption was growing, the trillionth ton would be released somewhere around 2040.
That as of 2013 more than three trillion tons of carbon were still left in the ground as fossil fuels set the human species up for a confrontation with its own nature along the following lines: Can we keep our paws off the cookies freely within our reach that would make us sufficiently obese that we could die from our overeating? Moreover, just how strong is the species’ self-discipline as against the lure of the pleasure garnished from additional albeit baleful consumption? That 2012 saw record carbon emissions into the earth’s atmosphere suggests a rather dramatic disconnect between what the scientists report and how policy-makers, business practitioners, and consumers react. Incredibly, the two were going in opposite directions!
The flaw is likely in human nature itself. Specifically, the disproportionate worsening of an on-going, un-rectified situation receives too little weight in the human decision-making process on whether to engage immediate correctives (or even damage-control). “Continuing rapid emissions now is kicking the climate can down the road, leaving climate change for our children and grandchildren,” said Christopher B. Field, a scientist working at the time on another intergovernmental study on climate impacts. He added that the can “gets to be bigger, heavier and harder to move with each kick.”[6] Why would rational human beings kick the can nonetheless?
The answer could simply be that for the homo sapiens species through roughly 60,000 years, natural selection favored those humans who focused on the next meal or running away from the tiger closing in. Cognition and perception being limited, attention to solving problems that would turn harmful only much later could be expected to suffer. Put another way, for the vast majority of the species’ existence, societal problems inflicting only or primarily long-term harm did not exist because complex social living arrangements did not exist beyond the intimate relations of a small clan. We cannot expect natural selection to “turn on a dime.” After tens of thousands of years, suddenly humans live in large nations and work in big corporations. Our very design, while being well-adapted to the hunter-gatherer “stone age” human existence, has not sufficiently adapted (yet) to the radically changed agricultural and urban ways of life.
The sapiens name of our species means “knowledge” or “wisdom” in Latin. Such a prideful label notwithstanding, it is worth pondering whether human reason can compensate sufficiently for the lag in adaption. Does reason discount long-term costs (especially those that are low-probability but severe), or is human desire, still oriented to hunter-gatherer needs, as if still going forward even though the species only recently quickly turned left, performing the task? Nietzsche would likely point out that reasoning is simply contending instinctual urges striving to overcome each other. Unfortunately for modern man, the urges have been born and raised in a very different context and are behaving as though they were still in it. It could be that the quick (reckless?) development of complex social arrangements (politically, socially, and economically) will turn out to be our species’ undoing. That is to say, the sheer magnitude of the discounted long-term harm of our own doing could easily come about well before the process of natural selection will have had sufficient generations to effect enough adaptation to rid us of the tyranny of an antiquated human nature.
Human beings are moral agents. Generally speaking, we have
consciences and a sense of ought,
which according to David Hume is not derived from what is. In other words, ethical principles are not obtained from
describing some object or situation. Organizations consisting of human beings
do not have consciences; nor are companies able to have a sense of ought that is not reduced to monetary
terms. Such terms being empirical, they cannot get to ought anyway. The illusion that corporations are themselves moral
agents comes from the failure to distinguish an organization itself from not
only its human members, but also its culture. While it may seem that an organizational
culture is distant from the people who inhabit the organization, as if culture
were somehow based at the organizational level, culture is simply a way of saying that most people in a group share
certain basic beliefs, values and ways of behaving. Beliefs, values and conduct
pertain to persons. Physiologically, the brain thinks, values, and conducts the
rest of the body. There is no “organizational brain.” Rather, culture refers to
a critical mass proportion of persons having something in common. This does not
mean that the “something” exists apart from, or "above," the persons.
One major criticism of the E.U. has concerned its “democratic
deficit.” The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, has taken most
of the criticism because the bureaucrats are not elected. Even though the
European Council consists of elected state executives, the state legislatures
are viewed as “closer to the people” and therefore more democratic. At the E.U.
level, the European Parliament is the most directly democratic, as the EP’s
representatives are directly elected by E.U. citizens. Therefore, one means of
reducing the “democratic deficit” has been to increase the Parliament’s
authority relative to those of the Commission and the Council. Lest it be
thought that this solution has no drawbacks, the case of whether E.U. ships
should be permitted to be beached for recycling in South Asia illustrates a
problem. From: "Federalism and the Democratic Deficit: The E.U. as Suboptimal?"
