In the twenty-first century, there are two problems for our species’ survival—nuclear war and environmental catastrophe—and we are hurtling toward them knowingly. Moreover, the world faces these threats in significant part because of choices made by U.S. corporations and the U.S. government over the course of decades. Our own country’s actions have helped to create a situation of unprecedented peril.
The climate crisis is unique in our history and is getting more severe every year. If major steps are not taken within the next few decades, the world is likely to reach a point of no return. The nuclear weapons issue is talked about less, but is a major threat to our existence, increasing over time as we enter a risky new era of “Great Power competition.” Since the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, we have been surviving under a sword of Damocles. Without understanding and addressing these two threatening crises of our time, organized human life will not survive our century.
Human history is filled with records of horrific wars, tortures, massacres, and abuses. But today we face threats that are altogether different in terms of their sheer scale. For the first time, our entire species faces collective disasters. The environmental and nuclear weapons threats are truly existential, and what we choose to do will determine the fate not only of our species but of all the other species on Earth.
It has been argued that we live in the most peaceful time in human history. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who says that we are in a “long peace,” writes that “as one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister.” But this is exactly backward. The idea of a “long peace” depends on minimizing the many millions of deaths in warfare that have occurred since the end of World War II, including the countless bloodbaths for which our country is directly responsible. It is more accurate to describe this era as by far the most dangerous time in human history, with extreme violence a greater threat than ever before.[1]
The possession of thousands of nuclear warheads by the world’s most powerful countries places the entire world under constant risk of annihilation. We may not enjoy contemplating it, we may try to get on with our lives without considering it, but the nuclear threat hangs over us at every moment, everywhere we are. The idea that we are in a period of “peace” is a dangerous illusion.
Nuclear weapons are not just lying around unused in the background. They are in use at every moment to frighten adversaries, just as a robber who points a gun at a store owner is using the gun, even if he doesn’t fire it. What is misleadingly and euphemistically called “deterrence” is more accurately understood as “the constant threat of extreme violence.” Situations look more peaceful than they are if we do not understand the role of threats.[2]
With thousands of nuclear warheads held by the great powers, escalating tensions among those powers that could lead to a global war, and plans under way for the massive increase of an already out-of-control arms race, we face the possibility of terminal war, a war that would end human civilization altogether. And there are powerful forces pushing us closer and closer to the brink. The possession of civilization-destroying weapons by states, and the fact that those states are controlled by rulers over whose decisions we have little control, means we are all in peril.
On August 6, 1945, the United States demonstrated that human intelligence would soon be capable of destroying virtually all life on Earth. Things didn’t quite reach that point until 1953, with the development of thermonuclear weapons, but the trajectory was clear: nuclear weapons gave states staggering new destructive capabilities and plunged the whole world into unprecedented danger.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not terribly different from the firebombing of Tokyo, in terms of their savagery and disregard for innocent lives. Atomic weaponry merely made the mass murder of civilians more efficient. But the bombings did demonstrate how far human technological capacities had outstripped human moral capacities. They showed how the godlike power to smite whole cities could be unleashed by a country that saw itself as humane and righteous.[3]
Regrettably, the calamity of the Second World War, and the horrifying reality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (the true disturbing facts of which were suppressed in the United States) did not lead humanity to put a definitive end to great-power conflict and warmaking, or to eliminate the weapons and forbid their use. Instead, it sparked an arms race that nearly ended life on Earth for good.[4]
The frantic warnings of leading scientists were generally ignored. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” publicly opposed developing the hydrogen bomb, saying that “no world has ever faced a possibility of destruction—in a relevant sense annihilation—comparable to that which we face.” Oppenheimer was smeared as “more probably than not [an] agent of the Soviet Union,” and his career was destroyed. Joseph Rotblat, another Manhattan Project physicist, had refused to continue working on the bomb when it was clear Nazi Germany had stopped their own efforts at developing nuclear weapons. Rotblat dedicated his life to trying to eliminate nuclear weapons. Naturally, he, too, was accused by the American right “of being a servant or unwitting tool of the Soviet Union.”[5]
The 1955 Mainau Declaration, signed by dozens of Nobel laureates including Werner Heisenberg and Max Born, warned that “science is giving mankind the means to destroy itself,” and “it is a delusion if governments believe they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons.” Thus “all nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort,” or they will “cease to exist.” The same year, a manifesto penned by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein brought together some of the world’s leading scientists to warn that humanity faced a “stark and dreadful and inescapable” dilemma, namely: “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”[6]
The UN General Assembly’s first-ever resolution, in 1946, called directly for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.” The Soviet delegate, warning that any use of nuclear weapons “brings untold misery,” and “the rules of warfare must not allow the extermination of innocent civilian populations,” proposed a multilateral treaty providing that “all stocks of atomic energy weapons whether in a finished or unfinished condition” would be immediately destroyed. But the United States was unwilling from the start to consider giving up a formidable means of coercing others.[7]
The United States began developing plans for potential nuclear attacks against the Soviet Union years before the Soviets had nuclear weapons of their own. Physicists Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, in To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans, document plans made by the Truman administration in the late 1940s for nuclear strikes against Soviet cities, with a Joint Chiefs of Staff memo arguing that “offense, recognized in the past as the best means of defense, in atomic warfare will be the only general means of defense.” The Truman administration did not hesitate to use nuclear weapons as a means of diplomatic coercion. Secretary of War Henry Stimson commented as the bomb was being developed that it would be a “master card” giving the U.S. a “royal straight flush” in diplomacy.[8]
The decision to embrace the continued use of nuclear weapons was never approved by the U.S. public. In September 1946, a poll showed that over two thirds of Americans wanted the UN to “prevent all countries, including the United States, from making atomic bombs.” As the U.S. was announcing its plans to build a hydrogen bomb, 68 percent of Americans agreed there ought to be efforts toward an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.[9]
Fueled by paranoia about Soviet plans for world domination and an unbending commitment to maintaining global power, the United States initiated an arms race that reached almost unfathomable extremes. At one point, the U.S. possessed over thirty thousand nuclear warheads, and the Soviet Union ultimately reached forty thousand, enough to turn the whole planet into a wasteland many times over.
The worst nearly happened. The history of nuclear weapons is full of alarming “close call” incidents. Take the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, the United States discovered Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba, leading to a tense thirteen-day standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The crisis ended when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile installations in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba and secretly removing U.S. missiles from Turkey.
Why did Khrushchev make the reckless decision to put missiles in a domain that the United States insists it controls? There were two primary reasons. First, the U.S. was conducting a murderous terrorist war against Cuba, which could have potentially escalated into an invasion. This made the missile deployment partly a defensive move against a significant military threat. Years later, Robert McNamara recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,” he observed at a major conference on the missile crisis on the fortieth anniversary. Second, while Khrushchev had proposed a mutual reduction in offensive military capabilities, the Kennedy administration had responded with an unprecedented peacetime military buildup, despite already being well ahead in military capabilities.[10]
Kennedy refused Khrushchev’s proposal for public withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba in exchange for withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey; only the withdrawal from Cuba could be public. Kennedy insisted on secrecy for the removal of the American missiles in order to maintain the principle that while the United States could station lethal missiles near Soviet borders, the converse was not permissible. The Kennedy administration thus resisted what they knew to be a reasonable trade. It is hard to think of a more horrendous decision in history—and for this, Kennedy is still highly praised for his cool courage and statesmanship. His stance almost led the world to catastrophic destruction. As historian Christian Appy writes, “According to Kennedy’s own reasoning, what brought the world to the brink of nuclear war was not the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, but his insistence that they be removed,” his compulsion “to demonstrate his steely resolve to stand tough against the Communists” to avoid the risk of being “viewed as a paper tiger, as much by his own people as by Khrushchev and the world.”[11]
The crisis that brought the world closest to the brink of apocalypse began with Kennedy’s attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a “rational” person, but were unthinkable because they would have undermined the fundamental principle that the United States has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere. To establish that principle, the American president considered it entirely proper to face a high risk of a war of unimaginable destruction and to reject simple and admittedly fair ways to end the threat.[12]
The lesson should not need spelling out. The U.S. insistence on maintaining dominance, on refusal to grant other countries the rights claimed for ourselves, is not just unprincipled. It is dangerous. And in 1962 the uncompromising insistence on maintaining hegemony nearly led to the destruction of modern civilization. There is no reason it could not happen again.
Indeed, plenty of times over the course of the Cold War, automated systems in the United States and the Soviet Union warned of imminent nuclear attacks that nearly set off an automated response but for human intervention. In 1983, for instance, the Reagan administration had been simulating attacks on the Soviet Union and debating installing Pershing missiles in Europe (with a ten-minute flight time to Moscow), causing the Soviet government to believe that the U.S. was preparing an imminent nuclear first strike. This meant the Soviet Union was on hair-trigger alert, “very nervous and prone to mistakes and accidents,” because they were “geared to expect an attack and to retaliate very quickly to it.” At this tense moment, a Soviet automated warning system detected incoming ballistic missiles. A single Soviet military officer, Stanislav Petrov, who disobeyed protocol and did not pass the warning on to the next level, is thought by some to have saved the world by stopping a process that could have ended in a massive Soviet nuclear attack.[13]
It was not the only such incident. General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), reflected after the Cold War that we had so far survived the nuclear weapons era “without a holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” Butler called the U.S. strategic plan of 1960, which called for an automated all-out strike on the communist world, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I have ever reviewed.” Daniel Ellsberg, who worked as a RAND Corporation nuclear planner in the ’60s, was similarly horrified by a secret document he discovered that outlined contingency plans for the killing of hundreds of millions of Soviet civilians—what he called an outright “omnicide.”[14]
The United States and the Soviet Union developed both the capacity and the plans for destroying each other and the world, and then maintained systems that could easily have triggered this apocalypse with only a few simple mistakes or misunderstandings. Even if the ultimate disaster was a low-probability event, over a long period, low-probability events cease to be low probability.[15]
We are still doing it. Irresponsible nuclear policy didn’t end with the Cold War. In the Clinton era, STRATCOM produced an important study entitled “Essentials of Post–Cold War Deterrence,” concerned with “the role of nuclear weapons in the post–Cold War era.” A central conclusion: that the United States must maintain the right to launch a first strike, even against nonnuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be at the ready because they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict,” enabling us to gain our ends through intimidation. STRATCOM went on to advise that “planners should not be too rational about determining…what the opponent values the most.” Everything should simply be targeted. “It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed…. That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project.” It is “beneficial [for our strategic posture] if some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control,’ ” thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack. This is Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” formalized in strategy.[16]
Even Democratic presidents who have indicated support for disarmament have done precisely the opposite in practice. Barack Obama issued pleasant words about working to abolish nuclear weapons, then crafted plans to spend $1 trillion on the U.S. nuclear arsenal over thirty years. Obama’s programs to modernize nuclear weapons increased “killing power” sufficiently to create “exactly what one would expect to see if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike,” as explained in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.[17]
The Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is open about the fact that threatening the use of nuclear weapons is a core part of U.S. foreign policy, not just meant to deter nuclear attacks by other countries. The NPR says that “our nuclear posture is intended to complicate an adversary’s entire decision calculus, including whether to instigate a crisis, initiate armed conflict, conduct strategic attacks using non-nuclear capabilities, or escalate to the use of nuclear weapons on any scale” and “thus undergirds all our national defense priorities” including “deterring regional aggression.” The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which the United States has ratified, places an obligation on its parties to pursue “general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” The NPR instead says that “for the foreseeable future, nuclear weapons will continue to provide unique deterrence effects that no other element of U.S. military power can replace.” Indeed, when “deterrence” is understood to mean “the use of the threat of annihilation to attain compliance,” the NPR is correct that pointing civilization-destroying weapons at other countries has a coercive power that cannot be replicated. All of this is a violation not only of the UN Charter but the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make “good faith” efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely.[18]
China, which unlike the United States has a formal policy that it would never be the first country to use nuclear weapons (U.S. doctrine is that they can be used first if our “vital interests” are at stake), has strongly objected to the U.S. posture, saying that the U.S. logic of “seeking absolute military superiority” inevitably “stimulate[s] a nuclear arms race,” and that by “strengthening the role of nuclear weapons in its national security policy and lowering the threshold for their use, the U.S. has increasingly become a source of risk of nuclear conflict.”[19]
But the amount of mainstream debate within the United States on whether the existing nuclear policy encourages proliferation and endangers the world is approximately zero.
Since the United States first obliterated two civilian populations in 1945, there have been global popular movements to restrict or eliminate nuclear weapons. Lawrence Wittner, in Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, shows that these movements succeeded in bringing about the arms control measures that do exist, and that without popular pressure, there would have been little inclination on the part of successive U.S. administrations to take any steps at all toward reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles. In 1956, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, grumbled that the atomic bomb had developed “a bad name…to such an extent that it seriously inhibits us from using it,” and Eisenhower told his Joint Chiefs of Staff that “the current state of world opinion” would not permit the greater use of nuclear threats. It was public opinion, not the humanitarian instincts of policymakers, that curtailed proliferation and use.[20]
The government treated protesters with immense hostility. For instance, when the Nuclear Freeze movement arose in the 1980s, President Reagan’s national security adviser Robert McFarlane later recalled seeing it as serious political threat, and a “movement that could undermine congressional support for the [nuclear] modernization program.” David Gergen, who was the White House communications director at the time, says the prevailing view within the administration was that the Freeze movement was “a dagger pointed at the heart of the administration’s defense program.” Wittner shows that the administration engaged in a major effort to discredit the Nuclear Freeze campaign, with the president publicly declaring that “foreign agents” had helped to create it in order to ensure the “weakening of America.”[21]
The activists were tenacious and heroic. They are also mostly forgotten. In 1981, for instance, a group of women in the UK set up the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp outside a base being built to house nuclear cruise missiles. The women repeatedly disrupted construction on the base, and at one point thirty thousand women gathered to join hands around the base. The missiles were eventually removed, but the Peace Camp remained as an antinuclear protest until 2000.[22]
Antinuclear activism has been strong around the world, especially in those countries that were subjected to some of the over two thousand nuclear tests that have been conducted by the nuclear powers since 1945. Wittner reports on some of the initiatives in the Pacific nations. In Fiji, for instance, “church, union, and student organizations established the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group to work for the creation of a nuclear-free Pacific,” while “in Tahiti, thousands of people marched through the streets protesting French nuclear tests and demanding independence from France.” Marshall Islanders staged an occupation to resist U.S. plans to extend its military rights. In Palau, the people of the island voted to enshrine their opposition to nuclear weapons in the constitution, despite U.S. efforts to influence the vote. The efforts of peace activists did bear fruit, in the form of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.
All of their successes are now under threat.
Elaine Scarry has argued convincingly that the existence of nuclear weapons is necessarily deeply undemocratic. When a tiny number of people hold the fate of the Earth in their hands, she writes, we live in what is more accurately described as a “thermonuclear monarchy.” To better understand the situation, Scarry asks us to envisage a hypothetical world in which each country sits on a “flexible floor,” i.e., a trapdoor into the Earth. Imagine, she says, that with the push of a button, the trapdoor could be opened, and the country and all its people would vanish forever into the abyss. In a situation where a small group of people possess access to this button, at any time able to extinguish hundreds of millions of others, we would correctly describe the situation as incompatible with democracy, if democracy is defined as popular control over the fate of one’s community. As General Lee Butler asked: “By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear-weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet?”[23]
And yet this is the situation we are in. “I can go back into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be dead,” Richard Nixon once observed. Nixon was speaking accurately: he personally held the fate of countless millions in his hands, whether they liked it or not. Nor did Nixon hesitate to contemplate actually using this hideous killing machine. “If the president had his way,” Henry Kissinger commented, “there would be a nuclear war each week!” Indeed, according to a high-ranking CIA official, in 1969, after North Korea shot down a U.S. spy plane over the Sea of Japan, Nixon drunkenly ordered a tactical nuclear strike in response. Kissinger had to tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff “not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.”[24]
Former Clinton secretary of defense William J. Perry has pointed out how few constraints there are on a president who wishes to use nuclear weapons: “If a president decides to launch, he has the authority to do it, he has the equipment to do it, and, if it goes, there’s no way of calling it back and there’s no way of just destroying it in flight.” Former director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed in 2017: “Having some understanding of the levers that a president can exercise, I worry about, frankly, the access to the nuclear codes.” Speaking of Donald Trump specifically, Clapper said that under existing systems, if Trump had wanted to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea “in a fit of pique,” there would be “very little to stop him,” because there’s “very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option.” Clapper found this “pretty damn scary.”[25]
Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, said that we lack “some check, some process, some chain of command, some congressional notification, some form of break in which people can stop and consider even for just a brief period of time: Do we really want to do this?” The only barrier between ourselves and nuclear war is the president, that one person “has completely, with their own discretion, the capacity to destroy life on Earth.” During the Nixon administration, when Nixon’s drunkenness and paranoia were becoming evident, Senator Alan Cranston phoned the defense secretary and warned of “the need for keeping a berserk president from plunging us into a holocaust.” But then as now, the world’s fate depends on the president not going berserk.[26]
We know exactly how to overcome the threat of apocalypse: eliminate the weapons. Steps short of that can be taken to alleviate the threat, among them implementing Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones (NWFZ). These exist in much of the world, including Central Asia and across the Southern Hemisphere. For instance, the 1996 Treaty of Pelindaba created an African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone across the entire continent of Africa. Under its protocols, the nuclear weapons states are “invited to agree not to use or threaten to use a nuclear explosive device against any Treaty party” or to “test or assist or encourage the testing of a nuclear explosive device anywhere within the African zone.” The United States has yet to ratify the treaty.
The most important step would be establishing a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in the Middle East. This would end the alleged Iranian nuclear threat (and the pretext for the U.S.-Israeli bombings, assassinations, and sabotage in Iran). That crucial advance in world peace has long been blocked by the United States, however, because it would interfere with Washington’s protection of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. In 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the Obama administration for blocking an Egyptian proposal to ban nuclear weapons from the entire Middle East. Establishment of NWFZs is an important step toward reducing the nuclear weapons threat, and if the U.S. were a functional democratic society, in which public opinion influenced policy, the issues could be resolved. A 2007 poll of Iranians and Americans found them to be in agreement on nearly all the major questions related to nuclear proliferation, including on Iran’s right to nuclear power but not nuclear weapons, elimination of all nuclear weapons, and a “nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East that would include both Islamic countries and Israel.”[27]
There are other steps that can be taken. The United States has consistently rejected the idea of committing to a “no first use” policy, even though polls show two thirds of Americans support such a pledge. In 2021, the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force. It is the first binding agreement to comprehensively prohibit these weapons and aims eventually to eliminate them entirely. Nearly one hundred countries have signed it. Unfortunately, negotiations were “boycotted by all nuclear-weapons-possessing states, most NATO countries, and many military allies of nuclear weapons states.” The U.S. could demonstrate true international leadership by moving toward accepting the treaty and calling on the other nuclear states to do the same. But it hasn’t.[28]
Regrettably, that level of civilization still seems beyond the range of the most powerful states, which are careering in the opposite direction, upgrading and enhancing the means to terminate organized human life on Earth. George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in what James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says was clearly an “epic mistake.” The Bush administration also stood alone in rejecting an international cessation of the production of fissionable materials for weapons purposes (FISSBAN). In November 2004, the UN Committee on Disarmament voted in favor of a verifiable FISSBAN. The vote was 147 to 1 (United States), with two abstentions: Israel and Britain. President Trump dismantled the Reagan-Gorbachev INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty and immediately tested weapons that violate the treaty. We are not turning back. According to the Arms Control Association, Biden’s 2021 budget request planned to continue “the expensive and controversial nuclear weapons sustainment and modernization efforts it inherited from the Trump administration.”[29]
The Non-Proliferation Treaty creates a legal obligation for the nuclear powers to carry out good-faith measures to eliminate nuclear weapons. But the United States has led the way in refusal to abide by these obligations. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes that “reluctance by one party to fulfill its obligations breeds reluctance in others.” Former president Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. American leaders, he said, while claiming to oppose proliferation, “not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons,” as well as threatening first use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states.[30]
When Harry Truman left office, he commented that “the war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past—and destroy the very structure of civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations. Such a war is not a possible policy of rational men.” Robert McNamara, toward the end of his life, warned of “apocalypse soon,” saying that he regarded “current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous,” creating “unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own,” including the “unacceptably high” risk of “accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch,” and of nuclear attack by terrorists. Former Clinton defense secretary William Perry regards “the probability of a nuclear calamity [as] higher today” than during the Cold War, when we escaped global apocalypse by sheer luck. Former senator Sam Nunn also raised the alarm, writing that “we are running an unnecessary risk of an Armageddon of our own making.” Under current policies, “a nuclear exchange is ultimately inevitable,” international relations expert Michael MccGwire concluded in 2005.[31]
Given the risk, it would be wrong, even criminal, to fail to do what can be done to constrain the production and use of these terrible weapons. But we must also bear in mind that unless we address the nationalistic and militaristic drives that push us toward catastrophic confrontation with other powers, we are simply delaying a terminal conflict. Only the timing is in doubt.
In July 2022, British firefighters had their busiest day since World War II. A record-breaking heat wave produced catastrophic wildfires, which swept through towns and villages around the country. Firefighters faced “unprecedented” difficulties trying to put out eleven hundred fires in London alone, as temperatures soared above 104°F. In some places, entire streets were turned into charred ruins, and people’s homes were utterly destroyed within minutes. It was, said some who saw it, like a “scene from the Blitz,” with cottages turned to ash and their residents left to rebuild their lives from scratch.[32]
The event was not freakish or aberrational. It was entirely predictable. Global warming has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves in Britain and is leading to “a dramatically increasing trend in the number of summer days…with very high fire weather indices.” The “scenes from the Blitz” will become more common, as what were previously “once in a century” fire threats become annual occurrences.[33]
The month after the British wildfire disaster, it began to rain unusually hard in Pakistan. The rain did not let up, and soon Pakistan was experiencing one of the worst natural disasters in history, with a third of the country submerged under floodwaters. Twenty-seven thousand schools and fifteen hundred public-health facilities were destroyed or damaged, along with hundreds of bridges and dams and thousands of miles of roads. The prime minister reported that “village after village has been wiped out” and “millions of houses have been destroyed.” UNICEF reported that in early 2023, “as many as 4 million children were still living near contaminated and stagnant flood waters, risking their survival and well-being. […] Frail, hungry children are fighting a losing battle against severe acute malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria, dengue fever, typhoid, acute respiratory infections, and painful skin conditions.” The flooding is estimated to have caused $15 billion in damages, in a poor country, making it one of the costliest disasters ever to befall a population.[34]
Like the British wildfires, the flooding in Pakistan was not a freakish “act of God” but an expected result of climate change. The monsoons are intensifying because of moisture in the atmosphere, and rising temperatures are also melting Pakistan’s thousands of glaciers, further swelling rivers and exacerbating the problem.[35]
This, of course, is only the beginning.
The scientific literature on the climate crisis is harrowing. It shows that we are careering toward disaster, and that early warnings were too conservative. In November 2019, a group of more than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries issued a public warning that Earth is facing a “climate emergency.” They showed that many of our “planetary vital signs” (temperatures, sea level, ice mass, rainforest loss rate, biodiversity loss, etc.) are reaching critical levels. If the Earth was an individual, it would be one in immediate need of emergency care for multiple deadly ailments.[36]
Dire warnings from climate scientists abound. “Things are getting worse,” says Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization. “The only solution is to get rid of fossil fuels in power production, industry and transportation.” Susan Joy Hassol, director of Climate Communication, said, “I haven’t ever seen a time when we’ve broken so many records all at the same time,” pointing to “smashed records in temperature, sea ice loss, and wildfire” in 2023. Raymond Pierrehumbert, professor of physics at Oxford and lead author of the Third Assessment Report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), says that “we are in deep trouble” and “it’s time to panic.” We must move to net zero carbon emissions quickly because “there is no plan B.” UN secretary-general António Guterres did not overstate matters when he said in November 2022 that “we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.” Israeli climatologist Baruch Rinkevich says that people “don’t fully understand what we’re talking about,” noting that “everything is expected to change: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the landscapes we see, the oceans, the seasons, the daily routine, the quality of life.” He concludes, sadly, “I’m happy I won’t be alive.”[37]
The plausible scenarios involve suffering on an unimaginable scale. Half of the species on Earth may be wiped out as their environment changes in ways they cannot adapt to. The damage already done to animal populations has been horrifying enough. A billion or more people may be displaced from their home region, a series of refugee crises many times greater than the Pakistan flood catastrophe. Lethal temperatures could make much of the world unfit for life. (Beetles and bacteria might do all right.)[38]
Atmospheric CO2 is now at levels last seen millions of years ago, when global sea levels were twenty meters higher than today. Jeremy Lent, summarizing the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, notes that “whether it’s CO2 emissions, temperature change, ocean dead zones, freshwater resources, vertebrate species, or total forest cover, the grim charts virtually all point in the same dismal direction, indicating continued momentum toward doomsday.” Twelve researchers writing in BioScience warned frankly that life on Earth is “under siege” and “time is up,” with “an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records” being broken. “The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023.”[39]
Nevertheless, they conclude with a call to action rather than despair: “this is our moment to make a profound difference for all life on Earth, and we must embrace it with unwavering courage and determination to create a legacy of change that will stand the test of time.” Says lead author William Ripple, “Our situation is not hopeless.” But we have no time to waste.
The climate crisis is man-made, but responsibility does not fall equally on everyone. The rich countries, especially the United States, are substantially more to blame for the problem than many of the victims. Our policy choices have imposed a dire cost on others. The thirty-three million Pakistanis displaced by flooding suffer from the effects of the crisis, but they did almost nothing to cause it. Pakistan has produced only 0.4 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that have created this threat.
To clearly understand responsibility for the problem, it is only necessary to look at comparative emissions totals. By 2020, the 230 million residents of Pakistan were responsible for only 5 billion tons of carbon emissions, while the 330 million residents of the United States had produced over 400 billion tons. The majority of total carbon emissions have been from Western countries, with the contributions from the U.S. and Europe dwarfing the responsibility of China and India. Citizens of those countries live far less carbon-intensive lifestyles than do their counterparts in the U.S. As anthropologist Jason Hickel notes, the countries of the Global North are responsible for 92 percent of all the emissions that exceed the boundaries of planetary sustainability, while the majority of the Global South remains “well within their fair share of the boundary,” meaning they have “not contributed to the crisis at all.” Still, these are the countries that will suffer the most, including “82–92 percent of the economic costs of climate breakdown, and 98–99 percent of climate-related deaths.” Hickel concludes that it “would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice.[40]
It is also the case that not all residents of a country contribute equally to the crisis. The top 1 percent of income earners in the world generate 16 percent of the global carbon, and the top 10 percent of income earners generate about half of the total. Economist Solomon Hsiang notes that the effects of climate change are poised to further increase inequality, because warming does not have the same negative impacts everywhere. Hotter countries near the equator, where global heating will have the most catastrophic effects, already tend to be poorer, while some wealthier cold places “often benefit, since warming can actually improve human health and economic productivity.” Thus the destructive behavior of the wealthy will wreck the lives of the poor, delivering consequences that many of the perpetrators are comparatively insulated from.[41]
In other contexts, we often apply terms like “theft,” “arson,” even “murder” to describe deliberate actions by one party that destroy the lives and property of another. The term “carbon colonialism” has been coined to describe the way in which Western countries have improved their standards of living through burning fossil fuels, with the benefits accruing to the global 1 percent and the catastrophic costs falling on everybody else.[42]
The encouraging thing is that the outlines of a solution are known, because the causes of the problem are understood. Three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by fossil fuel use, so preventing catastrophic heating requires the elimination of fossil fuels. This is why a growing list of scientists, civil society organizations, and governments have endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative, which has proposed an international treaty for the phasing out of existing fossil fuel production and a global transition to renewable energy sources that would meet the demands of justice. The United States, however, has shown no interest in signing on to the treaty and moving it forward.[43]
In the United States, we have a clear domestic plan for the transition to renewable energy. The Green New Deal (GND) resolution introduced by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey lays out a basic framework for government action to keep the U.S. to its emission-reduction targets, while creating well-paying jobs. There is solid research explaining how it could work and how it could be funded. Economist Robert Pollin, who has done extensive work on the practical requirements, explains that the GND’s goals are not implausible or pie in the sky, but in fact quite workable. Pollin notes that it is an “entirely reasonable and not an especially difficult proposition to build a zero-emissions U.S. economy by 2050.” Nor does the GND end up being a net loss for society. In fact, it would be a net gain. Not to pursue the GND, when faced with the urgency of the catastrophe, is therefore indefensible.[44]
Of course, the GND only addresses the domestic component. But because the United States has among the worst per-capita emissions in the world, adopting the GND could demonstrate its willingness to rein in its destructive behavior and be willing to work constructively with the rest of the world on fair solutions. Instead, however, U.S. politicians have consistently placed the interests of the domestic fossil fuel industry over the future of humanity.
In the United States, the major institutions of society seem determined to make the problem worse. The Republican Party in particular is openly committed to blocking any meaningful climate action. Donald Trump, who has insisted climate change is a hoax conjured up by the Chinese, called for rapidly increasing fossil fuel use. In office, he shredded environmental regulations. The Trump administration’s 2018 review of fuel-efficiency standards argued that because global warming would worsen regardless of U.S. efforts, there was no need for fuel efficiency to reduce carbon output. Trump attempted to make sure federal agencies would, as The New York Times reported, “no longer have to take climate change into account when they assess the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects.”[45]
The Republican leadership has been frank about its intention to undermine the global Paris Agreement, the main existing international agreement to limit carbon emissions, adopted in 2015. One reason, which they hardly conceal, is that the Republicans wanted to smash anything done by the hated Obama. Another reason is the principled opposition to any external constraints on U.S. power. But the decision also follows directly from the party leadership’s uniform rejection of any efforts to confront the looming environmental crisis—a stand traceable in large part to the historic service of the party to private wealth and corporate power.
In GOP-run states, there is even an effort to punish banks that seek to address the climate crisis. Republicans are introducing “Energy Discrimination Elimination” legislation to ban the release of information on investment in fossil fuel companies. Republican attorneys have called on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to keep asset managers from purchasing shares in U.S. utility companies if the companies are involved in programs to reduce emissions—that is, to save us all from destruction.[46]
The Democratic Party, despite rhetoric about the importance of climate change, has not been much better at taking the action necessary to avoid catastrophe. In a campaign speech in 2008, Barack Obama said that future generations would tell their children that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But in office Obama acted much as his predecessor had, sabotaging global climate talks and escalating fossil fuel production. After the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, which failed in large part due to the U.S.’s unwillingness to propose an acceptable deal, Vanity Fair observed that “the Obama administration’s refusal to offer more than 4 percent emissions cuts by 2020 was seen by many other countries, rich and poor alike, as evidence that the U.S. under Obama was not that different than it had been under George W. Bush.” Forbes commented on the “irony” that George W. Bush, “widely viewed as a Texas oil man, presided over eight straight years of declining U.S. crude oil production,” while Obama, “who is not viewed as a friend of the oil and gas industry…has presided over rising oil production in each of the seven years he has been in office.” Obama was proud of his destructive record, boasting in 2012 that “under my administration, America is producing more oil today than any time in the last eight years…. We are drilling all over the place.”[47]
Far from embracing the GND, Democratic leaders disparaged it. “The green dream, or whatever they call it,” scoffed Nancy Pelosi. California senator Dianne Feinstein waved away activists by falsely claiming that “there’s no way to pay for it” and pointing out that many of the bill’s teenage supporters could not vote.[48]
Of course, the big business lobbies are even worse. The Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, and others have long been carrying out a massive publicity campaign to convince Americans that climate change is a hoax. The fossil fuel industry has been engaged in a decades-long campaign of sowing doubt, trying to ensure nothing whatsoever is done to prevent the catastrophe. ExxonMobil’s chief lobbyist was caught on tape not only admitting that the company had funded efforts to discredit the science, but that they pushed policies (like a carbon tax) that they knew would never be adopted, in order to further stymie any efforts at dealing with the problem. The lobbyist said that while Exxon did indeed “fight aggressively against some of the science” and join “shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts [to address climate change],” there was “nothing illegal about that,” and “we were looking out for our investments, we were looking out for our shareholders.” In other words, the structure of a capitalist enterprise, which pursues profit even at the expense of a livable planet, is to blame. Sadly, corporate power is so great that within our current institutional framework we have to bribe those who are destroying the environment if we want them to desist. This is nothing new. As the United States was mobilizing for war eighty years ago, Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained: “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.” If something is in the public’s interest, but not in the interests of the corporate sector, they will fight to prevent the problem from being solved.[49]
The industry’s effort to protect its profits at the expense of the species’ future has been effective. The Paris Agreement does not mention fossil fuels, and fossil fuel lobbyists are permitted to crawl all over the UN’s climate summits, ensuring that the resulting agreements do nothing to threaten the bottom lines of major corporations. Things have devolved to the point where 2023’s UN COP28[*] climate conference was chaired by a fossil fuel executive, who used his position to lobby for new oil and gas projects. (Biden climate envoy John Kerry called the selection a “terrific choice.”) Climate scientist Peter Kalmus wrote despairingly that the UN process had become a “sick joke,” as over one thousand fossil fuel lobbyists flooded the conference to ensure that the necessary steps to protect humanity’s future could not be taken. Kalmus said he was “almost at a loss of finding words to adequately describe the corruption and the evil at COP28.”[50]
Even as the leading scientific bodies make clear that catastrophe is looming unless we begin immediately to reduce fossil fuel use, phasing it out by midcentury, the move to increase oil production is still discussed as if it were rational rather than suicidal. Petroleum industry journals are euphoric about the discovery of new fields to exploit. The business press debates whether the U.S. fracking industry or OPEC is best placed to increase production. In The Wall Street Journal, we read that “South America has long been the world’s sleeping energy giant, with massive oil-and-gas reserves still untapped,” but “now it is rumbling awake, with huge implications for the global market.” The article mentions climate change exactly once, pointing out that the UN climate conference committed countries “to transition[ing] away from fossil fuels but essentially allowed governments to choose their own paths to get there,” then notes that “the recent activity in South America indicates countries in this region don’t intend to dial back soon.” The consequences of refusing to “dial back soon” go entirely unmentioned. Meanwhile, in the United States, both oil and natural gas production reached an all-time high in 2023 and “show no indications of slowing.”[51] In Biden’s first twenty-one months in office, the U.S. both produced more crude oil than under Trump and approved 74 percent more oil and gas wells than Trump did during the same time period.[52]
The New York Times observes that while Biden campaigned on addressing climate change, as president he “has taken a much different tack,” to the point where he has “hectored oil companies to increase production.” Biden decided to skip the COP28 summit, sending the vice president instead, in a “significant snub by a president who has vowed to fight global warming.” Even Biden’s signature piece of “climate” legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, was a “boon for [the] fossil-fuel sector.” To “contain” the “threat” of China, by “breaking Chinese dominance of the batteries and critical minerals needed to fuel the transition,” Biden jeopardized electric vehicle production by reducing the number of cars that qualify for subsidies, “disqualify[ing] a vehicle from receiving the credit if even one of its suppliers has loose ties to Beijing.”[53]
Some Democratic groups have even encouraged Biden to brag about the increased oil production, touting it as a “moderate” policy achievement. As climate scientist Bill Hare told the Associated Press, this continued expansion of fossil fuel production is “hypocritical and not at all consistent with the global call to phase down fossil fuels.” Peter Kalmus says he is losing his faith in humanity when he sees the continuation of an obviously disastrous course, even though the knowledge and capacity are available. As a climate scientist, he says, “I’m terrified by what’s coming down the pipe,” and given our current trajectory, “huge amounts of the Earth will become uninhabitable.” Kalmus says he believed that at this frightening level of heating, with disaster so obvious, “everyone would wake up and realize that none of our hopes and dreams will come to fruition if we don’t have a habitable planet.” But the hoped-for mass awakening has yet to occur.[54]
American media coverage of the climate catastrophe has been almost universally abysmal. In the financial industry’s paper of record, The Wall Street Journal, one can find an endless parade of denialist propaganda on the opinion pages, with headlines like Climate Change Isn’t The End of the World; Climate Science Is Not Settled; Climate Change Doesn’t Cause All Disasters; Climate Change Barely Affects Poverty; Fossil Fuels Will Save the World (Really); Even With Climate Change, the World Isn’t Doomed; Climate Change Saves More Lives Than You’d Think; Climate Change Is Affordable; and We’re Safer From Climate Disasters Than Ever Before.
But even in the liberal New York Times, climate change coverage has been poor. Not only does the Times run fossil fuel ads, publish “sponsored” articles written by the fossil fuel industry, and even make ads for the fossil fuel industry through its in-house advertising firm, but a comprehensive study by Berkeley researchers shows that few of the paper’s climate articles made mention of the most basic salient facts about the situation: that warming is happening now, that it is caused by record levels of CO2, that burning fossil fuels has caused these record levels, that there is a scientific consensus about this, and that warming is permanent.[55]
Sometimes, Times stories about warming-induced disasters exclude all mention of the role of fossil fuels. For instance, in its coverage of Colorado’s extreme wildfires during the winter of 2022, the Times mentioned that “a severe multiyear drought nurtured the brittle-dry conditions that allowed the fire to sweep through residential areas,” but did not mention that our burning of fossil fuels is causing such extreme drought and worsening wildfires. Yet fire scientist Jennifer Balch, director of the Earth Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, was unequivocal when discussing the Colorado fires: “I want to be crystal clear about this. Climate change is playing a role in this disaster—absolutely.”[56]
The tragedy of the climate crisis is that if it had been dealt with back when it first came to public attention in the 1980s, it needn’t have been a calamity threatening the future of the species. Instead, with both U.S. political parties entirely subservient to industry interests, and a concerted campaign of denial and doubt-sowing, a serious problem turned into an existential crisis that will cause untold suffering for billions of people around the globe. It is a horrendous injustice, in which the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries inflict misery on the poorest people due to an unwillingness to take the basic measures to ensure civilization can sustain itself.
The IPCC’s 2023 report was by far the most dire warning it has yet produced. The report made clear that we must take firm measures now, with no delay, to cut back the use of fossil fuels and to move toward renewable energy. The warnings received brief notice, and then our strange species returned to devoting our scarce resources to the pursuit of our own destruction.[57]
But the game is not over. There is still time for radical course correction. The means are understood. If the will is there, it is possible to avert catastrophe. Here, too, however, popular mobilization is essential. We need people who take responsibility for safeguarding the welfare of future generations. To adopt the phrases used by indigenous people throughout the world: Who will defend the Earth? Who will uphold the rights of nature? Who will adopt the role of steward of the commons, our collective possession?
* COP stands for Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.