The Politics of the Giant Human Asteroid

 

Prologue: unfolding climate catastrophe

I watched the discussion about the “unfolding environmental disaster” (climate chaos) at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2025. Al Gore opened the debate with a brief summary of the unfolding global calamity of unchecked burning of fossil fuels. He said:

“The world releases 175 million tons of greenhouse gases daily into the atmosphere. The accumulated amount now traps as much extra heat as would be released by 750,000 first-generation atomic bombs exploding every day on the Earth. That’s insane for us to allow that to continue. Human-induced climate change has fueled disasters which have inflicted over $3.6 trillion in damage since 2000.”

I also watched another climate talk Al Gore delivered in Paris – March 28, 2025. The presentation of hundreds of images depicting the evolving and destructive anthropogenic climate crisis was awesome and extremely alarming. The entire planet, land and seas, and mountains, and permafrost and icebergs are part of a violent dance of upheaval and danger. Humans, especially fossil fuel magnates, have left nothing intact, alone. The burning of their petroleum, natural gas, and coal pollutes humans and all other living beings, including the atmosphere and the natural world. But, worse, the greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet. Their gases include carbon dioxide and methane, which capture heat energy from the Sun. For example, in January 2025, the global economy, by sector, dumped the following amounts od carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

And the warmer the planet, the more hostile it becomes for life in the seas, forests, mountains, valleys and human societies. Higher temperatures are warning bells of terrestrial and marine revolutions. Less food, less healthy water, droughts, heat waves and tornadoes and hurricanes and rain bombs and flooding and fires increase risks and diseases and death.

Are humans doing themselves in?

Al Gore should know. While I was working on Capitol Hill, Gore was already a Senator who had grasped the importance and danger of climate change. At different times, Gore and I had the same Harvard professor, Roger Revelle, who inspired us, in some ways, to focus on global warming (Gore) or, in my case, to include the human impact on the environment in my understanding of the world. In fact, Revelle encouraged me in exploring the transfer of American agricultural science and technology to the tropics. As a result, I wrote my first book, Fear in the Countryside,^[1] during my postdoctoral studies at Harvard.

In his 2006 book, Inconvenient Truth, Gore speaks about the irresponsible climate policies of the warmonger President George W. Bush: “The Bush-Cheney administration,” he says, “was determined to block any policies designed to help limit global-warming pollution. They launched an all-out effort to roll back, weaken, and–wherever possible–completely eliminate existing laws and regulations. Indeed, they even abandoned Bush’s pre-election rhetoric about global warming, announcing that, in the president’s opinion, global warming wasn’t a problem at all.”

Gore is right. I had the same impression. I “retired” from the US EPA in 2004, the end of the first administration of George W. Bush.

Gore started carrying his environmental message with a sophisticated slide show that made “a compelling case that humans are the cause of most of the global warming that is taking place, and that unless we take quick action the consequences for our planetary home could become irreversible.”

Planetary emergency

Gore was convinced, just like I am, that:

“The climate crisis is, indeed, extremely dangerous. In fact it is a true planetary emergency. Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], working for more than 20 years in the most elaborate and well-organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have forged an exceptionally strong consensus that all the nations on Earth must work together to solve the crisis of global warming. The voluminous evidence now strongly suggests that unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina, in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. We are melting the North Polar ice cap and virtually all of the mountain glaciers in the world. We are destabilizing the massive mound of ice in Greenland and the equally enormous mass of ice propped up on top of islands in West Antarctica, threatening a worldwide increase in sea levels of as much as 20 feet.

“The list of what is now endangered due to global warming also includes the continued stable configuration of ocean and wind currents that has been in place since before the first cities were built almost 10,000 years ago. We are dumping so much carbon dioxide into the Earth’s environment that we have literally changed the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. So much of that CO2 is being absorbed into the oceans that if we continue at the current rate we will increase the saturation of calcium carbonate to levels that will prevent formation of corals and interfere with the making of shells by any sea creature. Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc; it is us.”

About 20 years after Gore’s “inconvenient truths” reached the public, his global slide presentations in Davos and Paris stressed the same dire condition civilization and the planet face from the perpetual fueling of this machine civilization by petroleum, natural gas, and coal.

Only this time, March 2025, Gore was more intense and furious, though full of knowledge and hope. He presented the scientific evidence of the harm of the greenhouse gas emissions with pictures, data, and charts. But he also stressed the rapid advances and public acceptance of solar and wind energy technologies. He said that “the renewable energy revolution is unstoppable.” He was emphatic the people behind the harm were the executives of fossil fuel companies. He ended his presentation by looking at the audience, saying, “you and I must continue to speak truth to power.”

Speak truth to Americans and the world

Speaking truth to power is important and tenable for as long as the power is democratic. When democracy is drowned by oligarchs or plutocrats, the conversation of speaking truth to power is lost or ignored. Then we need to go a step further.

The Athenians of early sixth century BCE invited Solon to legislate and thus recreate the political foundations of their polis. Solon did and abolished slavery and prepared Athenian citizens for sharing power. Kleisthenes, after Solon, completed the transition to democracy – making the people of Athens the ruling power. Once Athenian citizens were trusted to rule and be ruled by citizens like them, democracy became the political foundation of Athens, as solid and beautiful as the Parthenon dedicated to goddess Athena, who was a protector of Athens and a model of freedom and intelligence and craftsmanship for the Greeks. The key to democracy was trust among the citizens and the rule of law. Democracy means the people have the power, not the few privileged, the oligarchs, or the few wealthy, the plutocrats.

Now that the petroleum, coal, and natural gas oligarchs / plutocrats / billionaires are holding power, democracy is pushed aside. The governing billionaires are not interested in truth because truth exposes their role in the life-threatening and dangerous state of the global environment / climate chaos.

Gore spoke eloquently about the danger and the alternatives to that danger. But since the petroleum billionaires are in charge of policy and government, we need to learn how the Greeks faced democracy and tyranny. After all, the Greeks created the only science-based and rule-of-law civilization that became the pillar of our own modern civilization. But this modern version of Western civilization, yes it used Greek science and technology, but its ethical standards were not Greek. It became mechanized and industrialized. Nevertheless, knowing how the Greeks invented democracy and science and how they solved their own problems helps us understand and possibly resolve our crisis. This was one fundamental reason why I wrote a new book covering Greek history from the Bronze Age to our time. We need the Greeks because, in a way, we are Greeks.^[2] Our climate emergency must be addressed. It is now threatening both humans and all other living beings with disease and death.

One of the persons that participated with Gore in the discussion of climate chaos in the World Economic Forum was Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh. The distinctive virtue of this “banker” revolutionary is that, like the fathers of Greek democracy, he has the ability to help people trust themselves in resolving their problems and those of the community. Yunus trusted very poor people with small amounts of money for the improvement of their lives. The poor returned the money they borrowed. Yunus spoke about the need for a new civilization divorced from fossil fuels. I agree with Yunus and I realize that such a prospect would save both humanity and our Mother Earth. So, Gore, with all his resources and connections, should create a global university-like research and political action organization to save the planet. We need thinkers and doers like Yunus, politicians like Gore, and other outstanding human beings and scientists who love the Earth and democracy free from fossil fuels. Together we must build a new civilization.

Meanwhile, Americans must take money away from elections, so democracy has a chance to breathe. Bribing people to vote the way of the billionaires or threatening judges who issue orders to reverse the destructive activities of the unelected billionaire Musk must cease. These activities mirror a pathology of hubris, certainly inimical to democracy and clearly unamerican and unpatriotic. The Democratic Party must endorse a strategy of return to power but democratic power and power of the elimination of fossil fuels. Trust all Americans to do the right thing, if they know the truth about democracy and climate emergency.

NOTES

1. Evaggelos Vallianatos, Fear in the Countryside: The Control of Agricultural Resources in the Poor Countries by Non-Peasant Elites (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Company, 2976). ↑

2. Evaggelos Vallianatos, Freedom: Clear Thinking and Inspiration From 5,000 Years of Greek History (Universal Publishers, 2025). ↑

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Evaggelos Vallianatos.