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

Spurred on by the myriad inventions from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the related consumer demand for the conveniences, the Industrial Revolution itself played a major role in what would come to be known as global warming or climate change. In 2015, the Paris Agreement stipulated, notably without any enforcement, a global temperature rise of 1.5C as a ceiling. Just a decade later, scientists were saying that the threshold would be exceeded. Even amid the searing heat in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, the fear around the world in halls of government was less oriented to the what the new normal climatically would bring than to whether Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz, which was known as an oil checkpoint through which over 20 billion barrels of oil were being transported per day. It was as though our species no longer had any control over how far global warming would go.

The full essay is at "On the Transition to Clean Energy."

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: Guilty but Free

Because Syria’s government had not signed onto the Rome Statute, which renders governments and their respective officials subject to the International Criminal Court, including its arrest warrants and verdicts, Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother, Mahar, who were then in absentia under Putin’s protection in Russia, were not subject to the ICC when a Syrian court found the two brothers guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes on August 11, 2026. The two men could evade the death sentences issued by their own country’s judiciary as long as they could be protected by the Russian president in Russia. Although an Israeli court had tried and convicted the Nazi Eichmann of crimes against humanity, so a precedent existed for national courts adjudicating that crime, the fact that Israel had to illegally kidnap Eichmann in Argentina and the al-Assad brothers could evade being held accountable for their horrendous crimes in Syria suggests that the right, proper, and effective court to hear cases on crimes against humanity, as well as war crimes, is international, such as the ICC. That court’s weakness, however, as in Syria, Russia, and Israel not being subject to that court’s jurisdiction, points to a hole in jurisprudence on crimes against humanity, assuming that the proper and necessary jurisdiction is rightly international rather than national. With the U.S. having recently announced a full-on attack on the ICC (and its prosecutors) at the behest of the indicted suspect Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, it could be asked whether the ICC was in a position to “fill the hole” in the jurisprudence of crimes against humanity (and war crimes), or whether a coalition of the willing of national governments would have to start from scratch to construct a new international criminal court (and block diplomacy and trade with any country not willing to be bound by the new international jurisprudence). The judicial case against the al-Assad brothers (and their maternal cousin, who was in the courtroom and thus could be held accountable by the national court for having led the 2011 Daraa crackdown) demonstrates the value in shoring up international jurisprudence on crimes against humanity (and war crimes).

The full essay is at "Syria's Bashar al-Assad."

On the Startling Pace of Global Warming: Calculus Applied

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

The full essay is at "On the Startling Pace of Global Warming."

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

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

The full essay is at "El Nino as a Distraction as the E.U. Swelters."

On the Global Order: Experts Missing the Big Picture

Although the reasoning of government officials in foreign policy can be impeccable, they are susceptible to being so oriented to the intricacies of the “chess” playing that they may actually be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, a ship that sank in the icy Atlantic in 1912. At a talk by American foreign-policy experts at Yale’s School of Global Affairs in March, 2025, Ely Ratner, who served as an assistant secretary of defense, and Celeste Wallander, who was also an assistant secretary, joined Andrea Kendall-Taylor of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) to speak mainly on U.S. foreign policy in regard to Russia and China; only scant mention was made of the situation in Gaza even though a holocaustic genocide was well underway there. What the speakers said about the post-World War II world order was most telling; what they did not say, however, spoke volumes.

The full essay is at "On the Global Order."

Global Warming Accelerating

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

The full essay is at "Global Warming Accelerating." 

COP30: Is Symbolism Enough Amid Climate-Change?

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

The full essay is at "COP30." 

Complexity in Global Warming: On the Imprint of Pride

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

The full essay is at "Complexity in Global Warming."

Climate Change in Europe: On the Culpability of the Media

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

The full essay is at "Climate Change in Europe."

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

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.

The full essay is at "UN Climate Conferences: An Institutional Conflict of Interest."

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.

The full essay is at "Be Fruitful and Multiply."

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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.

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.

The full essay is at "A Hot and Hostile Planet."

Energy and Global Population

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

The full essay is at "Energy and Global Population." 

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

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

The full essay is at "Record Global Warming." 

Deforestation in Brazil: Exacerbating Climate Change

On July 17, 2020, satellite data from Brazil's space agency showed that deforestation in Brazil's Amazon was accelerating. "Nearly 3,000 square miles of tree coverage were lost in the 11 months that ended June 30 .That is a 64% increase from the year-earlier period, when 1,772 square miles of forest were destroyed."[1] The deforestation in 2020 was "likely to exceed 2019's total of 3,900 square miles by a 'wide margin," according to a senior scientist at the space agency.[2] Under normal circumstances, which the Wall Street assumed, we would consider the government's claim that not enough troops were available to patrol enough of Brazil's massive Amazon jungle to even slow the acceleration. According to Ricardo Salles, the environment minister, the government wanted to "attract foreign investors to fund sustainable economic development in the jungle."[3] That is to say, the matter boils down to (international) political economy. However, the circumstances were not normal.

The full essay is at "Deforestation in Brazil: Exacerbating Climate Change."

1. Paulo Thevisani, "Brazil's Forest Losses Quicken," The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2020.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

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

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

The full essay is at "Externalities Management and Climate Change."

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

2. Ibid.

Will Breakthroughs Save the Planet?

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

The full essay is at "Breakthroughs in Climate Change."

China's Population: Demographic Imbalances and the Climate Emergency

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

The full essay is at "China's Population amid Climate Change."

Do You Believe in Global Warming?

On September 16, 2012, “Arctic ice covered just 1.32 million square miles—the lowest extent ever recorded. ‘The loss of summer sea ice has led to unusual warming of the Arctic atmosphere, that in turn impacts weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, that can result in persistent extreme weather such as droughts, heat waves and flooding,’ NSIDC scientist Dr. Julienne Stroeve noted in a press release. ‘There's a huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the public,’ NASA scientist James Hansen said, adding that he believed, ‘unfortunately, that gap is not being closed.’ What the scientific community understands is that Arctic ice is melting at an accelerated rate -- and that humans play a role in these changes. According to the panel, humans are ‘really running out of time’ to prevent atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from reaching levels that would precipitate runaway climate change. Hansen warned that even maintaining current concentrations of approximately 390 parts per million for several centuries ‘guarantees disaster.’”[1] Nevertheless, record amounts of carbon dioxide were emitted into the atmosphere in 2016 to at least 2018, and 2016 was the hottest year on the planet as of 2019.[2] What makes an intelligent species, homo sapiens, go in the wrong direction even from the outset of an announced, guaranteed disaster? Timing and mentality have a lot to do with it. 

The full essay is at "Believing in Climate Change."

1. Joanna Zelman and James Gerken, “Arctic Sea IceLevels Hit Record Low, Scientists Say We’re ‘Running Out Of Time,” The Huffington Post, September 19, 2012. 
2. Kelly Levin, "New Global CO2 Emissions Numbers Are In. They're Not Good," World Resources Institute, December 5, 2018 (accessed October 21, 2019).