The E.U.’s Parliament and the U.S.’s House of Representatives in Dialogue

On November 1, 2024, “All Saints Day” in Roman Catholic Christianity, the E.U. announced that a peaceful delegation of the elected representatives of the EU’s Parliament would be travelling to Texas during the following week to “meet American counterparts,” which is to say, a delegation of the elected representatives of the US’s House of Representatives.[1] The key word here is counterparts, for the European Parliament is indeed of the same type of legislative body and at the same level in its federal system as is the American House of Representatives.

The full essay is at "The E.U.'s Parliament and the U.S.'s House."

---

1, Peggy Corlin, “MEPs Seek First Contact with Trump or Harris Regimes in Texas Next Week,” Euronews.com, November 1, 2024.

Be Fruitful and Multiply

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

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

---

1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), First Treatise, sec. 59 and Second Treatise, sec. 7.

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.

Adding Anti-Trust to Monetary Policy: The Case of Groceries

Monetary inflation is a complex phenomenon. Not only can its causes be several; it can make it more difficult to distinguish immediate and medium-term economic conditions from more long term, or structural changes impacting our species economically.  Of the former, the relationship between inflation and whether the markets are competitive or oligarchic (or even monopolies) can be better understood, and this in term can put us in a better position to assess the impact of longer-term changes, such as those stemming from the huge increase in the population of human beings since before the industrial age. The price of food (i.e., groceries) is a case in point. Specifically, the impact from presumably temporary shocks during the Covid pandemic should be distinguished from the impact of oligopolistic markets in keeping prices high, and of the increase in human mouths more generally (and longer term) representing increased demand for foodstuff in on a relatively fixed planet.

The full essay is at "Anti-Trust and Monetary Policy."

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.

The full essay is at "On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming."

---

1. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.

Energy and Global Population

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

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

Cases of Coronavirus: Comparing China, the U.S.A. and Italy

On March 26, 2020, “the US overtook Italy and China as the country with the highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases.”[1] At first glance, this statement can gain sufficient traction to become definitive. The implication that the U.S. is mismanaging the pandemic can even be regarded as valid even though the comparison itself is invalid.

The full (plena) essay is at "Cases of Coronavirus: Comparing China, the U.S.A. and Italy."

1. Jeffrey Sachs, “Why America Has the World’s Most Confirmed Covid-19 Cases,” CNN.com, March 27, 2020 (accessed March 28, 2020).

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."

Greek Austerity: Pressure on the Environment

“While patrolling on a recent cold night, environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis caught a young man illegally chopping down a tree on public land in the mountains above Athens. When confronted, the man broke down in tears, saying he was unemployed and needed the wood to warm the home he shares with his wife and four small children, because he could no longer afford heating oil. ‘It was a tough choice, but I decided just to let him go’ with the wood, said Mr. Gourdomichalis, head of the locally financed Environmental Association of Municipalities of Athens, which works to protect forests around Egaleo, a western suburb of the capital.”[1] Tens of thousands of trees had disappeared from parks and forests in Greece during the first half of the winter of 2013 alone as unemployed Greeks had to contend with the loss of the home heating-oil subsidy as part of the austerity program demanded by the state’s creditors. As impoverished residents too broke to pay for electricity or fuel turned to fireplaces and wood stoves for heat, smog was just one of the manifestations—the potential loss of forests being another. On Christmas Day, for example, pollution over Maroussi was more than two times the E.U.’s standard. Furthermore, many schools, especially in the north part of Greece, had to face hard choices for lack of money to heat classrooms.

Greek forests were succumbing  in 2012 to the Greeks' need to heat their homes as austerity hit.   source: Getty Images

Essentially, austerity was bringing many people back to pre-modern living, perhaps including a resurgence in vegetable gardens during the preceding summer. At least in respect to the wood, the problem was that the population was too big—and too concentrated in Athens—for the primitive ways to return, given the environment's capacity. 

The full essay is at "Greek Austerity and the Environment."

1. Nektaria Stamouli and Stelios Bouras, “Greeks Raid Forests in Search of Wood to Heat Homes,” The New York Times, January 11, 2013.
2. Skip Worden, God's Gold, available at Amazon. 

Democracy and Over-Population in India: Foreign Direct Investment

How well can the democratic form of governance serve as a means by which a society is circumscribed, or restricted in some way? In other words, can self-government be used to enact self-discipline on the body politic itself? Adding another level to this question, can elected representatives be expected to go beyond fixes that are perceived societally as sufficient to redress the underlying causes of governmental, economic, or societal problems? Far from urging or implying the supremacy of non-democratic forms of government, such questions invite improvement in democracy itself. In this essay, I reflect on these questions using India’s industrial policy as a case study.

 

Singh and Gandhi at a rally. It is clear who's the boss.   AP

 

 The full essay is at "India's Industrial Policy."

 

 

7 Billion People Worldwide in 2011: Catholicism's Humanae Vitae Compromising or Protecting Human Life?

According to the Huffington Post, “Amid the millions of births and deaths around the world each day, it is impossible to pinpoint the arrival of the globe's 7 billionth occupant. But the U.N. chose on October 31, 2011 to mark the day of that occupant's arrival with a string of festivities worldwide, and a series of symbolic 7 billionth babies being born.” I contend that the milestone is nothing to celebrate; rather, it should have served as a wake-up call for us all, lest the species continue undaunted to maximize itself right out of existence. Both the slope and its relative abruptness, evident in a historical perspective, ought to have given us all pause in our assumption that our species would necessarily go on without either self-regulation or a drastic correction from nature. 

                                            Source: UN Population Division

The full essay is at "The Human Species as an Ecologically Maximizing Variable: Religion as a Catalyst?"

Carbon-Dioxide Emissions amid Global Warming: A Species’ Death-Wish

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning rose 5.9 percent in 2010, the largest amount on record, according to an analysis released in early December, 2011 by the Global Carbon Project. According to the analysis as reported by the New York Times, “the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.” 

The full essay is at "Carbon Emissions: A Species' Death-Wish."

Melting Permafrost Unleashing Killer Bacteria and Viruses: Climate Change Heats Up

As the Northern climes warm, our species may soon be vulnerable to ancient—even beyond ancient— bacteria and viruses. We are familiar with pathogens to which our species has some immunity, built up from repeated prior contact. As a species, we could lose everything from illnesses in which the modern human body has no experience and thus no built-up defenses.

The full essay is at "Bacteria and Viruses in Melting Permafrost."

Springtime for China's Coal Industry: Is China Too Big to Swerve Enough to Avoid the Climatic Iceberg Ahead?

Even as Chinese government officials “called on the United States to recognize established science and to work with other countries to reduce dependence on dirty fuels like coal and oil,” China was “scrambling to mine and burn more coal.”[1] Notably, short-terms concerns were dominant. “A lack of stockpiles and worries about electricity blackouts” were “spurring Chinese officials to reverse curbs that [had] once helped reduce coal production.”[2] By December, 2016, coal mines were reopening, and with them coal miners were returning to work. The renewed activity would of course make it more difficult for China and the world to meet CO2 emissions targets, “as Chinese coal is the world’s largest single source of carbon emissions from human activities.”[3] In fact, China’s use of coal results in more emissions “than all the oil, coal, and gas consumed in the United States.”[4] The implications for being able to contain the global rise in temperature within 2 degrees C are not bright from this real-life scenario. It is important, therefore, to grasp the underlying dynamics behind China’s plight.

The full essay is at "Springtime for China's Coal".

---

1. Keith Bradsher, “Despite Climate Vow, China Scrambles for Coal,” The New York Times, November 30, 2016.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

CO2 Record-Level in Atmosphere: Implications for Human Population

In 2015, average global CO2 levels for the year surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time, the WMO revealed in its 2016 annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. At the time, any scientists regarded that ratio of carbon dioxide to other gases in the atmosphere as a “climate change touchstone.”[1] Curiously, however, 400 ppm was not considered a tipping point. It was still possible to reverse the progression of the ratio—yet no one seems to ask how long that would take. In this regard, the ratio’s accelerating rate is particularly telling. Practically speaking, 400 ppm may in fact be a tipping point.

The full essay is at "CO2 Record-Level."

---

1. Lydia O’Connor, “The Planet Just Crossed Another Major Carbon Milestone,” The Huffington Post, October 25, 2016.

Humanity Getting Ahead of Itself: A Mass-Extinction Event Already Underway

Around 252 million years ago, the “Great Dying” took out 90% of the world’s species. About 66 million years ago, a meteor caused the extinction of three out of four species, including those known to us as dinosaurs.[1] After 1.8 million years of existence, our own species is triggering yet another mass extinction event, according to a study in the journal Science by Stuart Pimm and Clinton Jenkins. According to Pimm, species are now going extinct at about ten times faster than scientists had thought. Prior to the arrival of homo sapiens (i.e., our species), the extinction rate was about 0.1 out of a million species per year; as of 2014, the rate had climbed to 100 to 1000 species per 1 million.[2] Behind this evolutionarily abrupt bump is not only the complicity of our species, but also unforeseen consequences that could easily take homo sapiens out of the equation.

The full essay is at “Humanity Getting Ahead of Itself”

---

[1] Seth Borenstein, “World on Brink of Sixth Great Extinction, Species Disappearing Faster than Ever Before,” The Huffington Post, May 29, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

Different Unemployment Rates in E.U. States: Stretching Federalism Too Far?

For August 2012, the unemployment rate in the E.U. was 10.5 percent, which translates into 25 million Europeans without a job. In the U.S., the comparable rate was 8.1. These figures mask the huge inter-state differences in both unions, especially in the E.U. What impact do they have on the respective federal systems? 

                                 

                                                               E.U. Unemployment Rate.    Google

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

Prognosis for the Chinese Economy

At the end of February 2012, the World Bank released its “China 2030” report in Beijing. The bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, said that China’s economic growth model is unsustainable, so significant reforms are needed. The report projects growth down to five or six percent annually by 2030, down from the ten percent annual growth in the thirty years up to the issuance of the report. Given the nature of the reforms, the Chinese government officials have their work cut out for them.

The full essay is at "Prognosis for the Chinese Economy."

Food Prices Rising: Will the Global Population Growth Outstrip Food Supply?

I contend that it is in our interest as a species to see that our population size is managed toward a steady state rather than as a maximizing variable (i.e., schizogenic). In fact, we have a right and obligation as one body to see that our various limbs are coordinated such that none engages in hypertrophy. That is to say, the whole has the right to protect its viability by arresting excessive growth in one of the parts. That much of the world's population growth takes place in the developing world does not mean that this right, or obligation, of the world is somehow a plot by the developed countries to oppress the poorer countries. In fact, much of the pain of the higher food prices is in the developing world rather than in the industrialized countries, so it is in the interest of the developing countries to accede to the world’s demand that their population growth be stopped.

The full essay is at "Food Prices and Global Population Growth."