WHAT’S GOING ON? SALIENT DIMENSIONS OF SCIENTIFIC, HISTORICAL, AND ETHICAL CAUSE AND EFFECT IN GLOBAL HEATING AND CLIMATE INJUSTICE

 WHAT’S GOING ON? 

SALIENT DIMENSIONS OF SCIENTIFIC, HISTORICAL, AND ETHICAL CAUSE AND EFFECT IN GLOBAL HEATING AND CLIMATE INJUSTICE 

Rev. Douglas Olds

18 September 2019

all rights reserved

"Human activities are the primary cause of the global warming of the past 50 years. The burning of coal, oil, and gas, and clearing of forests have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than 40% since the Industrial Revolution, and it has been known for almost two centuries that this carbon dioxide traps heat. [Nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture,[1] methane from natural gas production and other human activities, and other chemical agents (including water vapor)] add to the atmospheric burden of heat-trapping gases. Data show that natural factors like the sun and volcanoes cannot have caused the warming observed over the past 50 years. Sensors on satellites have measured the sun’s output with great accuracy and found no overall increase during the past half century. Large volcanic eruptions during this period, such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991, have exerted a short-term cooling influence. In fact, if not for human activities, global climate would actually have cooled slightly over the past 50 years. The pattern of temperature change through the layers of the atmosphere, with warming near the surface and cooling higher up in the stratosphere, further confirms that it is the buildup of heat-trapping gases (also known as “greenhouse gases”  [GHG]) that has caused most of the Earth’s warming over the past half century…

"U.S. average temperature has increased by 1.3°F to 1.9°F since 1895, and most of this increase has occurred since 1970. The most recent decade was the nation’s and the world’s hottest on record. In general, temperatures are rising more quickly in the north…

"Temperatures are projected to rise another 2°F to 4°F in most areas of the United States over the next few decades. Reductions in some short-lived human-induced emissions that contribute to warming, such as black carbon (soot) and methane, could reduce some of the projected warming over the next couple of decades, because, unlike carbon dioxide, these gases and particles have relatively short atmospheric lifetimes. The amount of warming projected beyond the next few decades is directly linked to the cumulative global emissions of heat-trapping gases and particles. By the end of this century, a roughly 3°F to 5°F rise is projected under a lower emissions scenario (US Global Change Research Program, 2014).

"The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20…The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario…The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization" (Rich 2018, 8).


Anthropogenic climate disruption and injustice is the crisis for our age.  It threatens to cause additional and escalating environmental and social changes that will displace people, cause health problems on an epidemiological scale, and require collective political and economic—if not civilizational--transformation.  This chapter will present a brief description of the issue: its scientific phenomenology, its ethical dimensions, and the historical roots of the crisis brought about in culture and society.  This chapter is intended to introduce the dimensions of the crisis—its broad causes and effects--within which derives the prescriptive project of decarbonization ecclesiology and praxis promoted in the rest of this document.

Part 1: Scope of Climatological Effects: Geology, Oceanography, and Atmosphere
The anthropogenic disruption of climate is a result of the heating of atmosphere and landforms by “radiative forcing” from the buildup of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) primarily from industrial combustion of mainly fossil fuels—natural gas, petroleum, and coal. Additional contributions arise from the release of non-fossil fuel sourced hydrocarbons such as halocarbons emitted from, for example, (older model and foreign) air conditioners and clothing dry cleaner processes. Also, as the earth warms, non-industrial sources of GHG have emerged including methane liberated from melting permafrost and agriculture. The Greenhouse effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide has characterized earth’s carbon cycle for millions of years, keeping the planet within a relatively stable range during the Holocene geological epoch. In a geologically rapid development—especially since the Industrial Revolution--human-derived emissions from economic processes have added a significant pulse of GHG to the atmosphere.  The world has moved from the Holocene into what is now termed the “Anthropocene” geological epoch (Brown 2015).

GHGs change the radiative balance (“forcing”) on the earth’s surface and in the atmosphere. Radiative forcing is the “change in energy flux caused by natural or anthropogenic drivers of climate change” (measured in Watts/square meter) (IPCC 2013).[2]  Radiative forcing is a measure of “insolation,” the contribution of energy from the sun on temperature measured near the earth’s surface, “a function of the reduction of Earth’s heat radiation to space, which reduction increases Earth’s energy imbalance (Hansen 2018). Global heating is a local or aggregate measure of insolation effected by anthropogenic changes in GHG emissions and land use and which contributes to many environmental effects, including:

·         Changes in local and global temperature

·         Increased frequency and intensity of storms

·         Increased variability of rainfall—both by droughts and deluges

·         Sea level rise from expansion from heat and melting land ice

·         Melting ice caps, glaciers, and changes in the cryogenic frost cycle

·         Ocean acidification—whereby oceans absorb carbon dioxide, acting as a sink for its increase--in the presence of H20, converting it to carbonic acid (Ibid.).

When burned in the presence of oxygen, hydrocarbon compounds (based on fossil fuel’s alkane chemical structure) release CO2 and H2O. This chemical process is known as “combustion.”  Both CO2 and H2O are radiative forcing agents with varied intensity. Other industrial processes emit other GHG compounds, such as Nitrous and Nitric Oxide, O3, and—especially in the combustion of coal—sulfur compounds.  These, and the presence of non-combusted CH4 (methane) in the upper atmosphere all have varied effects on radiative forcing.  These varied effects are sometimes quantified by their relative potency with respect to CO2’s radiative forcing (“Global Warming Potential”).

Complicating the science of measuring radiative forcing from GHG emissions is the impact of altitude. H2O in the stratosphere has a different radiative forcing potential than at lower atmospheric levels, and H2O at lower levels can stimulate cloud formation as well as change the properties (“emissivity”) of the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation.  The global “whitening” from clouds also can reflect a portion of earth-bound solar radiation into space (the “albedo effect”).

Additionally, other sources of global heating beyond anthropogenic combustion exist.  Volcanoes emit both GHGs and cooling aerosols.  While clouds can be cooling at certain altitudes by the albedo effect, climatological change in the frost cycle—melting of glaciers and regions of ice cover at the poles[3]—transform terrestrial surface areas from white to dark, reducing albedo and increasing the effects of insolation on surface temperature.

Changes in land use for human consumption—especially the development of asphalt-dominated cityscapes and by deforestation for residential and agricultural development—add other sources for global heating which drive climate change.  Like oceans, forests, and other biomes (especially grasslands and wetlands) are carbon “sinks”—they absorb CO2 into their biomass and transmit carbon compounds into long-term sequestration in soils (Lal 2004, 3-4).  The replacement of forests, grasslands, and wetlands by agriculture adds to the GHG loading of the atmosphere. Rice farming emits methane, as does raising of animals for meat.  When deforestation involves the burning (combustion) of a forest’s lumber, an additional vector of CO2 emissions is introduced.

In addition to oceans acting as a significant sink of carbon dioxide, ocean currents like the Gulf Stream moderate regional temperatures as they are driven in part by temperature gradients. As the Atlantic Ocean warms, the Gulf Stream is changing, contributing to climate change in coastal regions and globally.  The rapid melting of the Arctic icecap has been accelerated by changes in ocean currents as well as by heating of atmospheric temperatures.

Other significant environmental changes are documented by the IPCC (2013, 2014, 2018).  Biomes are under stress by climate and temperature change: wetland and mangrove communities, for example. It is also important to note that the ecological ranges of species are differentially affected: vegetation has a lower “species climate velocity” (Williams 2018) to migrate in response to temperature--and other climate-driven changes in habitat--than animals, and even the latter are limited in the case of projected rapid ecological disruption. Some organismal vectors of human and other diseases and stress have an expanded range under climate and habitat change with malign health effects (more on this below).

Part 2: Scale of Anthropogenic Impact on Global Environment
In 2012, Climate Activist Bill McKibben published an influential article in a popular magazine that quantified the “carbon budget” remaining to global societies: “Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons [Gt—billion metric tonnes] of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees [centigrade global temperature rise]” (McKibben 2012).  To contain global heating to 2 degrees,[4] the global carbon “allowance” is about 15 GtCO2/year.

However, he goes on to state, “The amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies [that aggregates] the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn– 2,795 [GtCO2], [five times] higher than 565 [GtCO2].”[5]

Since then, “global carbon emissions reached an all-time high in 2018… [to] a record high of 37.1 billion metric tons [37.1 GtCO2]. Total carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will also hit their highest level ever, at 407 parts per million—about 45 percent higher than their preindustrial levels” (Harvey 2018).  Comparing 2018 total carbon dioxide emissions with McKibben’s proposed yearly global “carbon allowance” shows that humanity is exceeding the latter by 150% and growing.  “Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are likely to have increased by about 2.7 percent in 2018, after a 1.6 percent increase in 2017…U.S. emissions are projected to grow by about 2.5 percent in 2018[6]…[Global] emissions are on the rise with coal use, including a 4.5 percent increase in coal in China and a 7.1 percent increase in India” (Ibid.). “In 2017, the largest absolute contributions to global CO2 emissions were from China (27 %), the US (15 %), the EU (28 member states; 10 %), and India (7 %) while the rest of the world contributed 42%” (Le Quéré, C. et. al. 2018, 2167).[7]

“Even in countries with high rates of deployment for wind and solar, such as India and China, growing demand for energy is still eclipsing growth in renewables” stimulated by economic growth and social demands for increased living standards that include political accommodations by central planners to build out coal and petroleum as energy sources (Ibid.).

Sources of renewable energy are increasing, on pace to provide ½ of the world’s energy needs by 2030 (Ibid.). However, secular economic trends including population growth continue to promote the combustion of fossil fuels.  McKibben’s (2012) calculation of the stores of fossil fuels intended by industry to be exploited and burned, if they come about, leads to a scenario of global temperature rise (and consequent changes in climate) far beyond the 1.5 degrees agreed to in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

According to International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018, 27) figures of 2018 global emission levels, the world has a roughly 66% chance of keeping global warming to a 2-degree rise if it immediately initiates a steady forty-year trend to phase out CO2 emissions entirely. Other scenarios by non-IPCC scientists are routinely promoted in the popular press as much more dire: some claim that the earth has already passed a tipping point where a far more significant global temperature rise looms even if CO2 emissions immediately cease. Other reports give global society “12 years” to begin to phase out emissions to keep global temperature rise within a 1.5- to 2-degree temperature rise.  Because of the nature of climate and economic feedback loops (discussed below), it appears likely that the IPCC (2018) scenarios for keeping temperatures within the 1.5-degree target agreed to in the Paris Agreement are far too optimistic.  “Current Paris commitments would need to be tripled to reach a 2 C target and increased fivefold to reach the 1.5 C target” (Harvey 2018).  Absent urgent and substantial change to policy and processes (see ch. 5 of this document, “What Can Be Done?”), society must consider the likelihood of catastrophic scenarios up to (and even exceeding) a 5-degree rise in global temperature from pre-industrial levels by the closing decades of this century.

Part 3: Anthropogenic Roots of Climate Disruption: Industrial Consumerism, Systemic Feedback, and Political Economy
A.      Sources of GHG Emissions
The primary driver of Global Heating and Climate Disruption is a carbon-combustion intensive economy.  Founded on the availability of low-entropy fossil fuels, industrial combustion converts fossil fuel resources into high-entropy waste in the form of GHGs taken up into the atmosphere’s ecological sink.[8]  In contrast with the “limits to growth” politics of the 1970s that anticipated that depletion of natural resource stocks would constrain human economies,  by the mid-1990s it was clear that human economies were instead constrained by flows of pollution that overtaxed natural resource sinks.  The stocks of fossil fuels have been increasingly exploited and combusted, creating a non-optimal flow of GHGs that exceed the sink capacity of the atmosphere to recycle increased carbon compounds back into terrestrial sinks (primarily vegetation, soils, and oceans).  The result is the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other GHGs, which drives increases in radiative forcing that raises temperature and disrupts (historical patterns of) climate.

The combustion of coal (around 43% of total 2017 emissions) overtook oil (ca. 35%) around the year 2000 as the most significant source of CO2 emissions on a global scale. Natural gas as methane (ca. 20%) is third in GHG impact, continuing its century-long, steady rise in emissions, while cement production’s slow but steady rise contributed around 5% of total global CO2 emissions in 2017 (Le Quéré, C. et al. 2018, figure 5, 2163).  Changes in land use (buildings, agriculture, afforestation, etc.) added about 15% of 2017 emissions, while oceans were an absorptive sink of anthropogenic CO2 emissions (ca. -20%).[9] While widely reported in the press as declining in 2017-8, the capacity of oceans to act as a sink of CO2 emissions may have blipped downward in response to geological variation, perhaps to resume its uptrend of absorbing anthropogenic CO2 (see Le Quéré, C. et al. 2018, figure 7, 2164). It is at this point unknown whether the capacity for oceans to act as a carbon sink has begun to decline.[10]

Excursus: The special case of aviation
                After electricity generation (42% in 2015), transportation is the largest source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions at around 24% in 2015 (IEA 2017, 12). Transport-related emissions have increased by 45% since the 1990s.  International trade in goods and services comprises a major part of this sector’s growth and will be further discussed below.  However, it is the absolute growth of the aerospace sector, while other industrial sectors’ emissions are stabilizing or declining, that needs to be addressed. The previous paragraph presented anthropogenic CO2 emissions according to their “macroeconomic” or ecological source.  Aviation as a microeconomic sector is manifesting secular growth of 5% per year while its fuel efficiencies are increasing about 1% per year (Carbon Brief 2019), so that aviation’s contribution to global radiative forcing is trending to double every 18 years, from about 4.9% of total in 2005 (Owen et al 2010, 2255).[11]  Even absent reductions in other sectoral contributions to Global Heating, by mid-century aviation and aerospace could contribute more than ¼ of all anthropogenic impact on radiative forcing and resulting climate disruption. With the introduction and increase of renewable sources of electricity and technological innovation in other economic sectors, the relative contribution of aviation could be significantly higher.

                The dominant salient attribute of the relative growth of the impact on radiative forcing, the Greenhouse Effect, and climate disruption by the aerospace industry is the necessity of fossil-fuel inputs for its propulsive energy.  While there have been some recent innovations for small planes that incorporate batteries and solar panels, larger jets and rockets demand highly concentrated fuels to generate the thrust for takeoff that offsets the force of gravity. Rockets substitute liquid hydrogen for fossil fuels to generate this thrust—the production of liquid hydrogen is itself currently a fossil-fuel intensive process[12]—while under foreseeable technology jets are susceptible to spark-induced explosion if they carry a substantial payload of hydrogen for fuel.[13]

                Aviation thus contributes to a major and to an increasing extent the radiative forcing that causes global heating and climate injustice. Its impact predominates in Western elites--the Jet Set of middle- and upper classes, especially in wealthy societies.  Even one trans-continental roundtrip by jet for an affluent family of four can make up 20-25% of its yearly household carbon footprint.[14]

B.      Western Political Economy
"More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy—the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

"Like the scientific story, the political story hasn’t changed greatly…Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer…Even some of the nations that pushed hardest for climate policy have failed to honor their own commitments. When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians"[15] (Rich 2018, 64-66).

The political economy of the West began its modern form in the Enlightenment that reshaped world pictures of nature according to mechanistic metaphors and Newtonian process.  These drove, and in turn were driven by, technological changes in industrialized combustion as the source of power.  Production speeded up.  The Industrial Revolution thus stimulated rapid material growth--the throughput (flow) of materials through economic processes to supply a growing population.  In order to convert production into economic demand, consumer desire had to be stimulated. The 19th Century became, in its Freudian and Madison Avenue emergences, the political-economic exploration of material desire—its stimulus, management, and satisfaction.  Consumerism, managerial science of marketing, and combustion became inextricably linked.

                Wolcott (2016) proposes that the foundation of expanding material scale in the application of resources (and its current manifestation in combustion-driven Climate Disruption) pre-dates the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.  Instead, the Crisis is founded in western colonialism and particularly in the “Doctrine of Discovery.”

"A series of Papal Bulls issued by the Vatican in the late 1400s … defined Christian Europe’s engagement with the non-Christian world…[furthering] the groundwork for Portugal’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

"Extractive mentalities enable climate change. But these [religious] frameworks, which benefited (white) Europeans, were well-established foreign policy two hundred years before Isaac Newton…

"Entrenched within this doctrine are critical notions of property ownership: a European country can own people and land the European monarchs have never encountered.

"European industrialization was possible because of both the scientific revolution and the extraction (rape and pillage) of lives – people, trees, animals, cotton, tea, tobacco – from the global South... Gandhi’s critique of capitalist colonial mentalities [indicates]: nature was turned into natural resources, people were turned into populations, and human beings were turned into white people" (Wolcott 2016, 6-9).

By this view, historical analysis of the drivers of climate change must include its roots in colonization and slavery, which enabled the promise of endless material growth by means of a capitalistic and extractive economy.  Papal doctrines of the 15th Century gave European explorers (as “Covenant people”) the moral and legal right to conquer and privatize common lands and peoples.  Misapplying Biblical texts intended to inspire the powerless, these Papal Bulls justified the powerful as they defined non-Christians as unworthy of land and resource ownership because the latter were not exploited to their “highest productive capacity” according to European standards.

European colonialism transformed pre-established indigenous environmental ethics of relationship with the land and communal tenure into a Lockean establishment of private property as the basis for civic membership.  As society speeded up during the outset of the Industrial Revolution, environmental resources were increasingly mobilized for economic transformation into consumer goods by the expansion of financial credit (“Haute finance” [Polanyi 1944]) applied to a buildout of fossil fuel infrastructures.  The economic and ideological changes unleashed by the Industrial Revolution led to what Polanyi (1944) terms the “Great Transformation” of society, whereby social relationships and ideologies become embedded inside of the self-regulating, laissez-faire market. Prior--in Pre-Industrial eras--the market was embedded inside of social relationships.  Pre-industrial market transactions were conditioned to serve social stability and relationships by mutuality and reciprocity (Ibid.). After the Industrial Revolution, society increasingly was structured by markets—its opportunities and its challenges.  This “Great Transformation” accelerated economic trends of combustion-fueled societal speed and consumerism.

                By the late 20th Century, an increasingly dominant political-economic ideology coalesced with various names: “monetarism” in the 1970s, “economic adjustment” in the 1980s, the “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s, and “neoliberalism” in the new millennium. Its features included:

·         Deregulation of markets and privatization of previously public assets

·         Politics emphasizing consumer sovereignty at the expense of representative democratic institutions

·         Differential profiteering from pervasive market failures and externalization of social costs of industrial production

·         The multilateral promotion of economic integration by foreign direct investment and international trade of goods and services

·         Promotion of full capital mobility and internationalization alongside partial mobility of (primarily) skilled labor

·         Expansion of finance into spheres of society previously unmonetized

·         Global institutional rules and rulemaking bodies[16]  establishing rights of producers and investors to unfettered access to foreign markets (which in turn promoted:)

·         “Race to the bottom” international harmonization of labor and environmental standards as countries competitively sought to attract foreign investors.[17]

Finance structured neo-liberalism’s pyramids of power.  Investors induced elites in the 2/3 world to sell out and privatize the indigenous commons, changing laws to legalize this expropriation and intensification of commodity extraction. In terms of climate disruption and injustice, neoliberalism stimulated GDP growth even as it became uneconomic. In other words, in a deflationary world economy characterized by negative interest rates (Daly 2014, ch. 28), neoliberalism enacted political-economic programs to continue and extend the scaling up of material production instead of what would (should) have been economic redirection into non-material services and human-scaled “development.”  Sustainable Development, neoliberalism’s 1990s alternative, proposed the social integration of human “capital” rather than the expansion of material flows and resource exploitation of “ecological capital.”  By the 1970s, theorists of Sustainable Development like Herman E. Daly recognized that the scale of the material economy had overflowed its systemic ecological optimum so that the material economy was producing more “illth”[18] than “wealth” when considered socially (Daly 2014).  However, there were powerful sectors—including fossil fuel industrialists—which continued to convert their privatized stocks of resources into private income (“rents”) as the global ecological system degraded.  They financed a substantial cultural and political program that disestablished social aggregates by valorizing ideologies of individualism and subjectivism (see next chapter), in turn coalescing political-economic power in established and propertied elites.

                The source of industrial profits and wealth in the natural resource sectors derive from private ownership of previously common possession by indigenous groups. As neoliberalism took hold, governments abetted privatization of lands held in the public trust toward mining and other special interests and their investors. Multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund promoted legal access to public resources and lands by foreign debt holders who demanded financial growth even in a declining and negative-interest rate, deflationary environment.  These private financiers privatized profits and socialized the costs, especially by externalization (the social costs of a market transaction not born by the parties to the transaction).  Degradation of the atmosphere is the primary manifestation of the externalization of costs, with differential impact and harms accruing to those not participating in this (non-optimal scale of) economic system and its transactions.

                In addition to political establishments of privatized ecological capital and the externalization of costs to outsiders in the global atmospheric commons, neoliberal elites effected political feedback onto public regulators in the form of contributions, bribes, and funding of junk science and “think tank” propaganda denying the causation of global heating and their responsibility for climate injustice.

Excursus: “Comparative Advantage”


"There are two dogmas that neoclassical economists must never publicly

doubt lest they be defrocked by their professional priesthood: first, that

growth in GDP is always good and is the solution to most problems;

second, that free international trade is mutually beneficial thanks to the

growth-promoting principle of comparative advantage. These two cracked

pillars ‘support’ nearly all the policy advice given by mainstream

economists to governments" (Daly 2014, 218).

In the early 19th century, when mercantilism defined economic relations between national powers, David Ricardo introduced the idea of “comparative advantage.”  Comparative advantage proposes that the best path for sovereign economic growth was for nations to specialize their production of goods from resources with which they were most relatively well-endowed and could produce at lower relative cost, and then trade with other sovereign nations in exchange for specialized goods produced by the foreign system.  Ricardo’s insight was profound, and the established economic powers initiated the age of “liberalism” which replaced national policies of mercantilism and protection of domestic industries. Instead, countries specialized in their economic advantages—processes and resources--as international trade flourished in the 19th century, notably reducing endemic warfare amongst the great sovereign European powers.

                With the return of European warfare in the 20th century, and with declining rates of return from industrial investment in the more affluent countries (Harvey 2007), policymakers returned to the idea that trade proceeding from the terms of economic advantage should be re-emphasized and accelerated. This set of policy programs came to be known as “neo”-liberalism.  The ostensible focus of international policy was on promoting specialization and increased trade, both to stabilize international relations and to promote economic efficiency from the gains from trade.

                Herman Daly’s skepticism (first proposed in Daly and Cobb 1989, ch. 11) regarding the neoliberal justification of stimulating trade rested on three premises.

1)      Ricardo’s insight regarding comparative advantage’s benefits from expanding trade presumed that capital to finance investment was situated nationally rather than internationally mobile.  Finance was focused to mobilize exchange of goods rather than to invest in foreign production. As capital is allowed to become unmoored from a national economy instead to pursue profit opportunities internationally, trade ceases to operate according to “comparative advantage” so that investment finance pursues “absolute advantage.”

Comparative advantage guarantees that we will all be better off

(and grow more) if everyone specializes in producing and exporting only

what they are relatively better at, and importing everything else. The

logic of comparative advantage is impeccable, given its premises. However, one of its premises is that capital, while mobile within nations, does

not flow between nations. But in today’s world capital is even more

mobile between countries than goods [and labor], so it is absolute, not comparative

advantage that really governs specialization and trade. Absolute advantage still yields gains from specialization and trade, but they need not be

mutual as under comparative advantage – in other words, one country can

lose while the other gains. ‘Free trade’ really means ‘deregulated

international commerce’ – similar to deregulated finance (Daly 2014, 219).

2)      Inside an economic world that had reached its ecological limits, the promotion of trade according to absolute advantage may be “uneconomic.” In other words, the promotion of trade by hegemonic regimes increases the material scale of economic processes to pay off investors and national debt.  The promotion of “free trade” inside a world that has exceeded ecosystem limits promotes more aggregate “illth” than wealth (though individual investors might continue realizing private income from material expansion of trade).[19]

Countries whose growth has pushed their ecological footprint beyond

their geographic boundaries into the ecosystems of other countries are

urged by mainline economists to continue to do so under the flag of free

trade and specialization according to comparative advantage. Let the rest

of the world export resources to us, and we will pay with exports of

capital, patented technology, copyrighted entertainment, and financial

services.

[Yet], specialization, if carried too far, means that trade

becomes a necessity. If a country specializes in producing only a few

things then it must trade for everything else. Trade is no longer voluntary.

If trade is not voluntary then there is no reason to expect it to be mutually

beneficial, and another premise of free trade falls. If economists want to

keep the world safe for free trade and comparative advantage they must

limit capital mobility internationally; if they want to keep international

capital mobility they must back away from comparative advantage and

free trade (Daly 2014, 219).

3)      Comparative advantage assumes full employment, otherwise investment capital flows to a country's absolute advantage in low-cost labor and relative lack of environmental regulation.  The neoliberal consideration of a country’s “comparative advantage” in labor “slack” commits Polanyi’s (1944) “economistic fallacy” by confusing labor as a means rather than as the ends of economic production.

Where investment capital is limited, countries may compete by "race to the bottom:” lowering labor and environmental standards.  Additionally, multilateral agreements like GATT, WTO, etc. have established rules and forums which outlaw "protectionism," such as any controls or regulation of goods and services that inhibit trade, as by requiring foreign goods to match domestic labor and environmental standards—and if not, be subject to the imposition of an equalizing tariff.  If the U.S., for example, were to institute a significant carbon tax on goods and services, while a trading partner country either does not, or institutes a lower tax rate on emissions, then it is likely that any attempt to harmonize production costs between countries by a domestic tariff would be ruled "protectionist" and thus subject to penalties of restitution to the affected foreign corporation.  This characterization of an alleged protectionist motive by the domestic imposition of tariffs appeals to the normative foundation of finding "comparative advantage" in the foreign country's acceptance of more considerable pollution/environmental degradation and/or relative lower standards of labor protection.  WTO and GATT agreed that a country may institute tighter regulations on labor and environment but cannot "protect" its conditions for labor and environmental quality through regulatory control of the free flow of goods and services (and increasingly, of financial investment) from countries with weaker standards.

                Because the neoliberal program of promoting material trade by the free flow of capital chasing absolute advantage in the form of the lowest cost of production, GHG emissions are stimulated by international trade regimes in at least three ways:

1)      Domestic policies limiting environmental externalization of costs and/or limiting the scale of material production may run afoul of international trade agreements that favor the interests of corporate producers of tradeable goods.  These interests may be foreign investors and domestic elites who gain the predominant share of income from trade while the global commons bear the externalized cost.  Gains from trade are privatized, while externalized social costs from pollution and waste are considered zero, allowing investors and governments to ignore the scale of waste from production (in GHG emissions) and instead to focus on expanding the scale of produced goods (and services) for trade.

2)      Transport of long-distance goods involves shipping and aviation, both of which add a vector of GHGs that is more significant in scale than if the production of goods occurred more locally to the end consumer. Trade devoted to and derived from neoliberalism’s policy of international stabilization against (climate-induced) political disorder—and the trade of climate-stabilizing technologies—involve long-distance, fossil-fueled transport in a positive feedback loop: in both cases, global heating derives from trade-driven increases in international transport and its fossil-fuel combustion.

3)      Countries pursuing domestic investment from foreign capitalists often have an incentive to reduce environmental protection and regulation of GHG emissions in an attempt to create absolute advantage by lowered regulatory cost (“race to the bottom” in international environmental [and labor] standards).

This excursus has focused on the anthropogenic roots of the climate crisis and global heating from long-distance transport from trade greatly expanded since World War II under the ideology of “comparative advantage and free trade.”  Private investor and consumer interests—and the operation of hegemonic and military finance by elites in both the developed and developing worlds—drive this expansion, continuing even as global material production has exceeded its optimal scale relative to biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere.

C.      Feedback in Anthropogenic Systems
The previous discussion of comparative advantage recognized positive GHG emission feedback from political-economic and anthropogenic processes involved in long-distance trade.  The operation of systemic anthropogenic feedback inside ecological subsystems is (the defining) characteristic of the Anthropocene’s rapid and significant pulse of GHGs into the atmosphere. Positive feedback in an ecological economic system results when global warming causes specific market behavior that makes global warming even worse. Perhaps most concerning of the material phenomenology and causation of anthropogenic GHG emissions, other than its absolute scale and growth, is the occurrence of potentially runaway, systemic feedback loops in climatological systems.

Jamail (2018) notes two ecological warming systems that positively feedback into accelerating GHG emissions: first, changes in the cryosphere from GHG-induced global warming that are altering the circulation of the Jet Stream and causes additional warming of tundra and polar icecaps.  As white ice caps melt exposing darker land,[20] the surface near the poles has reduced sun-reflective properties (albedo), bringing about local heating.  Also, as tundra in northern latitudes warms, permafrost melting liberates methane from soils.  This methane derives from chemical transformations of biomass and cellulose sequestered by soils in ecosystem carbon cycles of long-lapsed geological periods. Climate scientists warn of a temperature-induced tipping point in the liberation of methane by melting permafrost—a “methane burp,” as rapid permafrost melting emits a catastrophic pulse of methane into the atmosphere, drastically increasing global radiative forcing.

                Jamail’s other finding of systematic, anthropogenic positive feedback from global heating and climate disruption is that “sooner or later, the sea levels will rise dramatically….Once this happens…coastal cities will have to be abandoned due to sea level rise and increasingly destructive hurricanes.”  Jamail focuses less on social disruption than on the disruption of polar and coastal geography. However, the potential for positive feedback in GHG emissions is embedded in the military’s preparation for international social disorder from residential displacement and refugees as well as increased political unrest from food shortages, civil violence, and temperature-induced stress.[21]

The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional emitter of GHGs.  If it is called upon for increased operations in a climatologically disordered world, positive feedback results. Militarism’s operations stimulate global heating through emissions, with the result of social disorder, which feeds back into an increased operational GHG footprint as militaries attempt to contain the elevated social temper.

                In addition to the positive feedback on climatological systems by the increased scale of fossil-fueled transport for long-distance trade, by changes in the cryosphere’s albedo effect, and in the expansion of fossil-fuel-intensive militarism, the following positive feedbacks of anthropogenic global heating and climate disruption may be noted:

3) Aerospace

a.       Rocketry: As global environmental conditions deteriorate, there is an increased pursuit of human alternatives to settle outer space, which in turn promotes the expansion of industrialized rocketry and bigger rockets to carry heavier collective human payloads.  These larger payloads necessitate greater propulsive thrust to escape the atmosphere. Liquid hydrogen for rocket fuel is currently produced with a significant carbon footprint relative to payload (Alter 2009), and the contrails from rocket launches are not-adequately studied but involve significant amounts of water vapor which especially at stratospheric altitudes act as a radiative forcing agent (see also David 2017).

b.      Ecotourism:  The promotion of long-distance eco-tourism to visit disappearing biomes and cryospheres (glaciers and ice fields) would, to the extent this eco-tourism involves air travel, further adds a vector of GHG emissions to climate disruption of ecosystems.  Vanishing forms of nature under anthropogenic climate disruption feeds back positively into the desire to journey, with GHG emissions increased in a feedback loop.

c.       International conferencing and Jet Set climate alarm.  As global systems degrade, international panels and observers (and climate alarm lecturers) have become a growing industry.  These international affairs promote face-to-face meetings, relatively de-emphasizing the potential for low-impact technological telepresence.  The carbon footprint of these conferences and travel by expert lecturers feeds back (accelerates) as global climate and heating worsen.[22]

d.      Turbulence:  Increasing atmospheric temperatures are forecasted to triple incidents of severe turbulence (Hill 2019). Incidents of turbulence increase jet GHG emissions by fueling increased thrust in response to downdrafts and by extended rerouting of jet paths.

4)      Agriculture is involved in another environmental feedback loop.  As global heating and climate disruption stimulate new vectors and intensity of pest outbreaks, the incentive to increase the application of pesticides feeds back positively from its hydrocarbon-based feedstocks and production processes. As agricultural fields decline in productivity under conditions of heat and drought, demand increases for application and production of nitrogen-based fertilizers and resultant emission of GHG NOx compounds.

5)      Air conditioning.  As is well-known, increasing global heating incentivizes fuel consumption and combustion to power air conditioners. Until the global power grid is fully established in renewable sources, a heating globe will feedback in GHG emissions from powering ambient cooling. Additionally, air conditioners of older types--and in units produced by countries lacking stringent regulation of hydrofluorocarbons--make use of very potent GHGs in their refrigerant technologies. These can leak from both operational and obsolete (landfilled) units, further feeding anthropogenic global heating.

6)      Dry cleaning and laundry.  As global heating increases, human perspiration and grime increases, and the need for personal laundering increases, another positive feedback in energy consumption. Williams (2016) reports that laundering is projected to increase by 8.3% per capita between 2015 and 2050.  In addition to this feedback between increasing temperature and the utility grid’s application for dryers and washing machines, the process of dry cleaning emits potent GHGs.

7)      Nuclear power.  As substitutes are sought for sources of power generation to replace fossil-fuel combustion, many policy advocates point to expanding sources of nuclear power.  The dangers of this source will be discussed more fully in chapter 5 of this dissertation, but from this consideration of positive feedback, it should be noted that the operation of nuclear power plants requires cooling employing substantial applications of water, which are, in turn, heated upon exit.  Many nuclear power plants are sited on large bodies of water.  As the reactors require constant cooling, the surrounding water is heated as it is re-released back to its source.  Increased demand for nuclear power to neutralize the impact of combustion feeds back onto bodies of water in the form of increased heat.

8)      The financing of propaganda and politicized data by wealthy and unregulated industrialists keep citizens complacent about the climate crises and embedded in consumerism fueled by the carbon-intensive economy. Consumer complacency stoked by the profits privately derived from the historical and increasing scale of combustion seems destined to escalate carbon emissions inside a materialist political economy of realized and valorized consumer “sovereignty.”


Part 4: Social Effects of Global Heating and Climate Disruption
By 2030, the number of people worldwide affected by floods is expected to triple. Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause the deaths of roughly 250,000 people each year…By 2080, the frequency of heatwaves in the New York metropolitan area is projected to triple. By the turn of the next century, global sea levels will have risen by one to four feet, potentially turning hundreds of millions of people into refugees (Rich 2018, 70).

This chapter has already addressed both the collective impacts of refugees on the expansion of military combustion as well as changed vectors of diseases.  There are increasing calls to reframe the environmental crisis of “climate disruption and change” to that of “climate injustice” (Moe-Lobeda n.d.).  At this point, it is necessary to analyze the effects of global heating and climate disruption from the perspective of unequal and differential impact on groups, incorporating ethical dimensions and evaluations of “injustice.”

A.      Scopes of Injustice: Differential Impacts on Human Groups
Ecological matters are linked to social justice. Climate Disruption and global heating do not impact every person or group equally.  Those who bear the greater brunt of environmental harms and costs suffer unequal opportunities for human flourishing. Climate Disruption differentially impacts the poorest and most vulnerable first (Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato Si [2015])—on the margins of gender, class, race, and future generations. Moe-Lobeda (2013) advocates for recognizing “structural evil” in anthropogenic systems, predominantly those that bring about suffering and the unjust diminishment of human flourishing in oppressed groups.  This section will outline the differential impacts on social aggregates, while the next section will more fully describe how injustice may be evaluated by analysis of culpability, accountability, and the conceptual application of “climate debt.”

                Contextualizing the ecological crisis as “Climate Injustice” rather than “Climate Change” focuses on human accountability rather than on geological cycles. Categories of climate injustice include race/ethnicity, gender, class, generational future, and other species.  Human accountability to the latter will be addressed in chapter 4 of this dissertation, while contemporary responsibility to future generations derives from the political theology of atmospheric trusteeship, also introduced in chapter 4.

Racial Injustice in Climate Disruption:  Hurricane Katrina in 2005 demonstrated visually in news reporting the vulnerability of African-Americans in low-lying New Orleans to the intensification of storms and resulting surges in sea levels.  Historically- and economically-marginalized ethnic groups often settled in low-lying metropolitan areas as opposed to more privileged groups settling on higher grounds.  This residential vulnerability of African-Americans and poorer groups was demonstrated again when Hurricane Harvey in 2015 blasted Houston with deluges and storm surges that not only flooded out vulnerable residents but also caused runoff-induced toxic chemical emissions from local petroleum refineries.  “Environmental Racism,” proposed in the 1980s to characterize marginal ethnic groups’ susceptibility to toxic dump siting in their neighborhoods, has more recently been recognized in group susceptibility to climate disruption and global heating.

                Relocation from the effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey additionally demonstrates a racial or ethnic pattern to the political phenomenon of climate refugees.  Many residents have not returned to New Orleans after domestic relocation in the wake of Katrina.  This differential pattern of vulnerability to residential instability is projected to be writ large in increased international and non-Euro-American refugees displaced from low-lying global regions suffering rising sea levels and agricultural disruption and drought.  The racial/ethnic implications of groups on the move from climate disruption—and the protectionism of privileged societies to deny refuge—leads to the vision of “climate apartheid,” the segregation and oppression of domestic and global refugees and their relegation to and concentration in sites increasingly vulnerable to on-going climate disruption.

Gender Injustices in Climate Disruption: Climate change has a greater impact on those sections of the population, in all countries, that are most reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods and/or who have the least capacity to respond to natural hazards, such as droughts, landslides, floods and hurricanes. “Women commonly face higher risks and greater burdens from the impacts of climate change in situations of poverty, and the majority of the world’s poor are women. Women’s unequal participation in decision-making processes and labour markets compound inequalities and often prevent women from fully contributing to climate-related planning, policy-making and implementation” (UNFCCC n.d.).

                In addition to deprived ethnic groups, women suffer differential negative impacts from climate disruption relative to men (Gebara 2017).  In traditional agriculture and householding, for example, women and children are the primary collectors of water.  Increased climate variability and drought means that women as a class in these societies increasingly must travel longer distances to both seek out and bring back water to their households (Tandon 2007). Their hygiene and nourishment may be relatively diminished as a result of prioritizing scarce resources for men.  In addition, Koster (2017) links the sexual exploitation of Native women in the North Dakota fracking fields to the culture of male violence in this extractive and climate-disrupting industry.  Extractive fracking process to supply the economy's insatiable demand for fossil fuels links to the culture of male violence resulting in both ethnic and gender suffering and injustice.

Class Injustice in Climate Disruption:  The externalization of social costs in the combustion economy favors the investor class that can privatize the benefits of market transactions while redistributing the externalized costs to those marginalized by the market and are greatly reduced in its benefits.  Thus, the combustion-intensive economy unfairly concentrates wealth and makes the poorer more susceptible to environmental degradation and (uninsured) health costs.  In addition, workers in the finance and managerial classes work mostly indoors, while day laborers often work outside. The latter are thus more vulnerable to an increasingly hot climate.  Both climate stress and health effects of climate disruption are borne differentially by poorer, day-laboring classes.

                “Climate change could cut agricultural yields by up to 30 percent by 2050, hitting the world's 500 million small farms the hardest. And it could force hundreds of millions of people in coastal cities from their homes, while pushing 100 million people into poverty in developing countries by 2030” (Rowling 2019).  “As Hurricane Dorian approached [the Bahamas in September of 2019], affluent people were able to get out early whereas the poor had to remain and try to ride it out…‘Everybody’s been hit, the rich and the poor, but for the rich it’s less severe because they live in better buildings’ [and are insured]” (Smith 2019).

                Injustices such as these, considered domestically, can be addressed by a political-economic progressive redistribution of income and insurance.  However, when these differential impacts are considered globally, privileged nations that siphon off resources and overtax atmospheric sinks by their extractive, combustion-intensive economies incur responsibility to poorer nations suffering social costs of that economy.  Mickelson (2005) labels this responsibility climate debt, a reckoning of which entails accountability. It is to the philosophical dimensions of accountability reckoned historically and multinationally to which this chapter now turns.

B.      Normative Aspects of Climate Injustice
The previous section proposed a group perspective regarding injustice, with justice defined as equal outcomes for groups.  This section will explore other implications of justice as fairness.  That is, the obligations to promote domestic and international justice derive from norms of “propriety” that primarily reflect historical culpability by and responsibilities of GHG emitting nations and economic interests as the foundation for reckoning climate debt.

                Climate debt derives from the inequality of ethical burdens involved in the realization of costs and benefits from economic systems. Shue (1999) promotes a first ethical principle, that of equity in (international and domestic) social relations:

              When a party has in the past taken an unfair advantage of others by imposing costs upon them without their consent, those who have been unilaterally put at a disadvantage are entitled to demand that in the future the offending party shoulder burdens that are unequal at least to the extent of the unfair advantage previously taken, in order to restore equality.

              Objections to this principle include that parties outside of private transactions but who nevertheless suffer costs or harms nonetheless benefit from the international economic system in other ways, especially in more rapid economic development by the transfer of technology derived from the economic system. However, this objection fails to note that technology transfer and economic development in the Developing world has already been paid for by the incurrence of substantial financial debts to international parties.

                The second objection to this principle is that “people cannot be held responsible for harm[s] that they could not have foreseen” (Ibid.)   This objection confuses individual culpability and collective responsibility (Caney 2005).  While fossil fuel corporations like Shell and Exxon that did foresee ecological damages from their operations might be held culpable and thus liable to punitive damages, societies are liable to restoring equity for the simple scale of damages they have done.

                The third objection to this first ethical principle of equity is that responsibility for ecological debt resides in the past, not by current generations.  Shue (1999) notes this objection has become mooted in the current climatological crisis and injustice because combustion-intensive societies have failed to act even after the social effects of global warming became widely publicized beginning in the late 1980s.

                A second ethical principle for equity—progressivity--follows:

Among a number of parties, all of whom are bound to contribute in some common endeavor, the parties who have the most resources normally should contribute most to the endeavor (Ibid.).

               The predominant objection to this principle of progressivity is its putative disincentive effects on individual and collective economic action and investment.  However, in an ecologically “full” world—where the economic system of material production has exceeded ecological limits (Daly 2014), financial incentives for boundless growth are reduced in importance. Moreover, as ecological and economic “illth” predominate as the scale of the material economy overflows its atmospheric capacity to act as a GHG recycling sink, the determination of incentives should be structured inside a multilateral principle of Rawlsian (1971) maxi-min, operating to distribute primary goods of environmental quality and income for householding sustenance according to progressive goals and  mechanisms (Caney 2005).

                A third ethical principle for equity in climate relations follows:

When some people have less than enough for a decent life, other people have far more than enough, and the total resources available are so great that everyone could have at least enough without some people from still retaining considerable more than others have, it is unfair not to guarantee everyone at least an adequate minimum (Shue 1999).

                Intergenerational equity and accountability to the public trusteeship of ecological capital and resource endowments (operating for perpetuity) are primary emphases of this principle.  Societies and nations content to watch hundreds of thousands of contemporary children die from privation and ecological disruption explicitly lack the trusteeship and accountability necessitated by this principle.

                At some point, the responsibility to satisfy climate debt for past national GHG emissions becomes culpability as a result of delay, recalcitrance, and moral inertia and denial.  It is then that climate debt may be accounted according to an escalating reckoning as ecological systems are pushed beyond tipping points into catastrophic disruption.  With this in mind, global economic powers must consider instituting escalating frameworks for urgency and responsibility to finance adaption and mitigation internationally according to the principles of equity presented (see also chapter 5 of this dissertation. For a presentation of normative dimensions in international frameworks of climate deliberations and negotiations, see Robb [ch. 1, 2010]).


Conclusion: Christians Resisting Commitment
Earlier, this chapter discussed various agents and forces in Western society that have been the predominant source of GHG emissions since the Industrial Revolution. This chapter now concludes with an outline of Christian world pictures and assumptions that support the seemingly inexorable political economy of exploitative carbon combustion.  The next chapter will go into more depth regarding social ideology and its links with theology and ecclesiology.

"We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.

"Could it have been any other way? In the late 1970s, a small group of philosophers, economists and political scientists began to…[ask] whether humankind, when presented with this particular existential crisis, was willing to prevent it. We worry about the future. But how much, exactly?
"
The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the perfect economic disaster.

"[The theoretical principle is that] human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations…

"If human beings really were able to take the long view — to consider seriously the fate of civilization decades or centuries after our deaths — we would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison" (Rich 2018, 66).

What are the roots of this moral inertia and torpor?  The rest of this dissertation will be devoted both to an analysis of the social ideologies that drive people to (resist) change and prescriptions to transform Worldviews, their Level 5 commitments to activate socially (Level 4), individually (Level 1), and with friends and neighbors (Level 2).

                Up to this point, this chapter has assayed the phenomenology of global heating and climate disruption: their scientific causes and effects, their historical root causes, and an outline of normative and ethical implications.  The Biblical theology of atmospheric care and accountability is assessed in chapter 4 of this dissertation to counter the claim that the environmental crises of our age have no Biblical analogy. This opening chapter of identifying phenomenology of cause and effect in the Climate Crisis now concludes with some ecclesial and theological drivers of climate impact—including social quietism and denial in certain churches and denominations.

                Theological ideologies that can impede church activism on the Climate Crisis include:

1)      The complexity of the issue: its science and normative structure

2)      A sometimes-explicit belief that the wealthy are to go unregulated because they are endowed by God to develop the world economically as a prelude for advancing the Gospel

3)      Subsidiary to 2), that the wealthy are prima facie favored by God, and thus should not be regulated or impeded as a matter of political morality

4)      Pieties which promote social quietism, including:

a.       A predominant focus on the Pauline Gospel of salvation of souls to the diminution of the Lukan Gospel of the Kingdom of God

b.      Avoidance of “pagan” concerns with valuing nature at the expense of human striving as a locus of divine revelation or concern

5)      Privileged perspective of tolerance of climate injustice as “God’s will” and subject to God’s sovereign remediation (“things will work out for the best”)

6)      Implication of human directives toward “dominion over the land” in Genesis (directly addressed in chapter 4).

The overly-realized eschatology of the immanent Jesus (see chapter 3) is linked with the methodological turn in Biblical Studies toward historical criticism—toward a focus on the Jesus of history versus the transcendent Christ of faith.  This emphasis inhibits ecclesiological considerations of accountability to Christ’s transcendence, a contemporary neglect of the deep moral topography of scripture. At the same time:

           "The growing general awareness that the order of nature within which man [sic] lives is a delicate ecological balance — a balance which cannot be indiscriminately exploited by men much longer without destroying the continuing possibility of human life...In addition there appears to be a growing belief that the theological focus on “history” in recent years has been extravagant or even entirely misplaced: it has turned attention in theology away from the natural world, which is ‘our real home’; it has led to a theological ignoring of the natural sciences and has thus helped to isolate theology from some of the most important and influential streams of human learning in modern culture; and it has contributed to and mightily re-enforced man's sense of self-importance and insularity, for history is preeminently the human story, and the ‘God of history’  seems principally involved in transactions with men" (Kaufman 1972).

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 NOTES

[1]“Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it also depletes the ozone layer. Since it also has a shorter life span, reducing it could have a faster, significant impact on global warming. But the largest source of nitrous oxide is agriculture, particularly fertilized soil and animal waste, and that makes it harder to rein in” (Shankman 2019).

[2] “[E]ven if greenhouse gases were stabilized at today’s amounts, [the] Earth is out of energy balance, more energy coming in than going out. That imbalance is our best quantitative guide for what needs to be done to stabilize climate. Today Earth is out of balance by 0.75 ± 0.25 W/m2 . The cause of the imbalance, of course, is the excess amount of greenhouse gases, principally CO2, in the air. It is easy to calculate how much CO2 must be reduced to allow a given increase in radiation to space. It is only a radiation calculation; it does not require knowledge 41 of uncertain factors such as climate sensitivity. The uncertainty in this radiation calculation is only of order 10 percent. If Earth’s energy imbalance is 0.50 W/m2 ,CO2 must be reduced from its present 407 ppm to 373 ppm. If the imbalance is 1 W/m2 , CO2 must be reduced to 342 ppm to restore energy balance” (Hansen 2018).

[3] “Since 1981, Arctic Sea ice has decreased by an average of 1.3 percent per year. Since 1989, the global mean temperature has increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit…By 2050, the Arctic Ocean is expected to largely ice-free in the summer” (Rich 2018, 70)

[4] Unless noted otherwise, all temperatures given in the text are Centigrade/Celsius. Likewise, all quantities of mass are metric.

[5] Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions since the pre-industrial era have driven large increases in the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) (Figure SPM.1c). Between 1750 and 2011, cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere were 2040 ± 310 GtCO2.  About 40% of these emissions have remained in the atmosphere (880 ± 35 GtCO2); the rest was removed from the atmosphere and stored on land (in plants and soils) and in the ocean. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic CO2, causing ocean acidification. About half of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2011 have occurred in the last 40 years (IPCC 2014, 4).

[6] While the United States has been curtailing the use of coal—with a higher CO2 to energy content than other fossil fuels—it has increased emissions from natural gas (mostly methane that converts in combustion to carbon dioxide and water vapor).

[7]“Global fossil CO2 emissions grew at a rate of 1.5 % yr−1 for the last decade (2008–2017). China’s emissions increased by +3.0 % yr−1 on average (increasing by +0.64 GtC yr−1 during the 10-year period), dominating the global trends, followed by India’s emissions increase by +5.2 % yr−1 (increasing by +0.25 GtC yr−1 ), while emissions decreased in the EU28 by −1.8 % yr−1 (decreasing by −0.17 GtC yr−1), and in the US by 0.9 % yr−1 (decreasing by −0.18 GtC yr−1)” (Le Quéré, C. et. al. 2018, 2165).

Based on national aggregate, China is the largest emitter of CO2 in 2017, while the United States has the largest per capita emissions (see esp. Figure 5 in Ibid., 2163 for trend and relative contributions of CO2 emissions by these nations).

[8] The atmosphere cycles carbon compounds through complex chemical reactions and mixing and through the osmosis of CO2 for photosynthesis (and sequestration) by plants.  During daylight hours, plants photosynthesize CO2, releasing oxygen and water vapor and depositing some of the carbon (in the form of hydrocarbons) in plant biomass. Some hydrocarbons are also transmitted into sequestration in soils (Lal 2004).

[9] Figures presented here do not add to 100% because of rounding, methodological assumptions in Le Quéré, C. et. al. (2018), and the existence of other sources of emissions.

[10] Complacency regarding this capacity ignores acidification from CO2 absorption into oceans. Additionally, rising ocean temperatures--at least locally--disrupts marine life (as does acidification) and established patterns of ocean circulation.

[11] It is important to distinguish aviation’s contribution to global CO2 emissions versus its contribution to radiative forcing, a more direct measure of its effect on global heating.  For a fuller discussion of how to quantify aviation’s climate and Greenhouse effects, see the text accompanying Figure 1 in the “Report of First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo’s 2018 Carbon Emissions” in the Appendix to this document.

[12] Technologies of electrolytic production of hydrogen fuel are emerging which could be sourced from the electrical grid (Williams 2016).

[13] Transportation vehicles carrying large payloads of hydrogen include the “Hindenburg” Zeppelin and the 1986 space shuttle “Challenger.”  Both exploded into a hydrogen fireball when ignited as a result of flawed design.  This dangerous flammability of hydrogen is also a consideration in the design of hydrogen-fueled automobiles and their fueling stations.

[14] Based on an average carbon footprint in Marin County (CA)—representing affluent communities—of 42 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year (Cf. Krieger 2018). “A normal transatlantic round-trip flight can release …almost as much as the average yearly emissions of one person in India” (Ortiz 2018).

[15] Exxon modeled in 1982 increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations through 2015 and predicted global temperature changes.  All of these models came within 10% of actual (Williams 2018).

“Shell started commissioning confidential work about the impact of burning fossil fuels on the global climate as early as 1981. However, analysis by DeSmog UK and DeSmog found that Shell did not start mentioning the possibility of climate change to shareholders in annual reports before 1991…Analysis of Shell’s annual reports and financial records at the time show the company did not give a clear warning to its shareholders about the financial risks ‘related to the impact of climate change’ and attached to their investments until 2004” (Farand and Kelly 2018).

[16] E.g. General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, World Trade Organization, regional trade agreements and authorities like NAFTA.

[17] For a fuller treatment of these facets of neoliberalism, see Harvey (2007).

[18] Uneconomic production in the sense that growth in resource throughput

reduces net wellbeing, as for example by the expansion of unincorporated costs (and harms) by economic externalities—the unincorporated social costs of private transactions.

[19] However, it is important to note the absolute decrease in drastic impoverishment under the last 40 years of international neo-liberalism: “In 1981 some 42% of the world’s population were extremely poor, according to the World Bank. They were not just poorer than a large majority of their compatriots, as many rich countries define poverty among their own citizens today, but absolutely destitute.

“Since then the number of people in absolute poverty has fallen by about 1bn and the number of non-poor people has gone up by roughly 4bn. By 2013, the most recent year for which reliable data exist, just 10.7% of the world’s population was poor (the modern yardstick for destitution is that a person consumes less than $1.90 a day at 2011 purchasing-power parity). Poverty has almost certainly retreated further since 2013: the World Bank’s finger-in-the-wind estimate for 2016 is 9.1%. Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, calculates that someone escapes extreme poverty every 1.2 seconds” (Economist 2017).

This beneficial result fulfills a requirement of justice (“maxi-min” distribution of primary goods [Rawls 1971]), yet the evaluation of aggregate “illth” exceeding “wealth” in a full ecological world indicates to “De-growth” economists that overall the neoliberal program has brought forth a decline in aggregate well-being measured outside of national GDP accounts (see chapter 5 of this dissertation for more discussion).

[20] And as other cryogenic surfaces (glaciers, seasonal snow and ice fields) are covered in “black carbon”/soot from coal and other fossil-fuel combustion processes.

[21] “Global temperature rise of just 2 degrees Celsius could increase intergroup conflicts (such as civil wars) by over 50 percent” (Maclay 2013).

[22] However, Jones (2019) appeals for the necessity of these conferences from the perspective of justice:  “A global flotilla of [sailboats] and videoconferencing paid for by wealthy nations sounds idyllic but insisting on sustainable travel will only reinforce the exclusion of the global south…The most powerful nations – who have historically been the drivers of carbon emissions while enduring fewer impacts – bring large teams to the conferences. They can take advantage of a divided process by being in many places at once. The United States, for example, brought nearly 150 people to the Paris Cop (UN climate change conference) in 2015.

“Least developed countries and small island developing states, on the other hand, often arrive with two or three delegates…Teleconferencing seems a more workable option, but this relies on fast, dependable internet, which many countries lack...Teleconferencing also wouldn’t allow for those not in the room to participate in the informal element of the negotiations. If powerful nations are the only ones physically in the room, they’ll have unique access to those meaningful, informal chats, those hallway huddles, those chances at collaboration.”

Jones’ argument ignores viable workarounds for the issues she raises, including leveling the field by equalizing access to telepresence that disestablishes “back room” negotiations and Wi-Fi and internet buildouts in less developed countries funded by nations historically-responsible for the crisis.  Both workarounds seem more beneficial to the atmosphere than continued business as usual at these large carbon-footprint conferences. Moreover, deliberative telepresence could be considered a primary good in the sense of  Rawls (1971) prioritizing the voices of those made most vulnerable by climate disruption.