The words apocalypse and apocalyptic are everywhere these days. And for good reason – the world we have known seems to be coming to an end. Truly several major threats are all converging like Biblical plagues at this point in time. They include climate change, artificial intelligence, the end of Christianity as we have known it, the reproductive crisis in the developed countries, etc. There is a reason that the most popular genre in Young Adult Literature is dystopian fiction (The Hunger Games and all that).

Technology is a prime mover in the creation of these threats. Suspicion of technology and fear of its impact on human life are not new. In the ancient Greek myths Prometheus, the Titan who gave the secret of fire to humans, was chained to a rock for eternity (as an eagle picked at his liver) by Zeus for this transgression. Mary Shelley’s prescient novel has the title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus as it picks up on the theme of the dangers of technology. The Mad Scientist is a cliché in movies new and old. And since WWII, nuclear weapons and the dangers associated with nuclear power have been haunting us.

Apocalypse I: Climate Change

Just recently, during the Canadian forest fire smog crisis on the East Coast, this writer participated in a book discussion club where the book that month was The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. The topic was proving so depressing that for the most part we simply talked about other things – local politics even. Already in the 1960s, people were well aware of the climate crisis and other environmental threats. We worried about the population explosion and how it would be impossible to bring the standard of living of 3^rd world countries up to that of the West without cooking the planet – but somehow the Green Revolution disarmed us and people stopped worrying about it all.

Too, energy companies can be blamed for characterizing climate change as a “tree hugger” issue much as the tobacco companies had done to downplay the dangers of smoking. That was then but even today oil exploration and extraction are subsidized in this country. And just recently, as his “pound of flesh” for voting for the budget bill that lifted the US debt limit, Senator Joe Manchin had the Mountain Valley Pipeline project embedded in the process.

Today’s climate problems trace back to the 18^th Century with Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the steam engine (1712) and James Watts’ dramatically improved design (1776). Promethean forces were unleashed by the Industrial Revolution: its demand for cotton fueling the Atlantic slave trade, its quest for raw materials leading to the plunder of more and more colonies, its competition leading to world wars, revolutions, progress and more progress until our use of fossil fuels has created what the newspapers like to call “an existential crisis” – by which they mean the threat to the existence of humankind on earth and not the personal angst of a chain-smoking intellectual on the Left Bank. Some people, known as transhumanists, take all this in stride, thinking that the existence of humankind on planet earth will have served its purpose once self-sustaining machine intelligence is achieved for then our work will be done and intelligence will be exported throughout the universe.

The United Nations has tried to provide structure for mitigating the effects of climate change, which makes sense in that it is the only forum that unites the governments of the countries of the world and this is a world crisis. In 1972, there was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm; a declaration of 29 principles was promulgated which has served as a model for later initiatives but the goals of the conference remained theoretical; moreover, the US and some other developed countries tried to thwart the ambitions of the conference – alas this would not be the last time the US would use its power and influence for such sabotage.  A UN meeting known as the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1990 which led to the Rio Convention which outlined goals for dealing with issues like bio-diversity and desertification. In 1997, there was the Kyoto Protocol which was designed to limit carbon emissions but true to its imperious ways, the United States did not ratify the protocol: historians might well mark this as the beginning of the end of the American hegemony – a leading nation must assume its responsibilities if it is going to continue to lead. America had had a good run, though, as “top nation” (to steal a trope from 1066 And All That) starting with the Bretton Woods agreement (1944) which made the US Dollar the exchange currency for the world and up to the fall of the Soviet Union (1991) – a run so impressive that political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously declared “The End of History” and the beginning of an American dominated era with liberal capitalist democracy the only possible government for nations going forward. But Fukuyama has been proved wrong, very wrong.

Ahh, what might have been!! As a freshman congressman in 1976, Al Gore held the first congressional hearings on toxic waste and climate change. As vice-president he launched the GLOBE Program on Earth Day in 1994; he supported the Kyoto protocol in the House in 1997 and 1998. Later, of course, in 2007 he would even receive a Nobel Prize for his climate activism but that was too late. The key moment came in 2000 with the disputed presidential election results in Florida. So many mistakes – Gore did not want the disgraced but terribly popular crowd pleaser Bill Clinton campaigning for him; Republican Governor Jeb Bush had just incorrectly stripped some 4000 black voters from the roles for having the same last name as a convicted felon; 3400 Jewish voters (who tended to vote for Gore) somehow voted for notorious anti-Semite Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach County, so confusing was the ballot; Ralph Nader took as many as 92,421 votes from Gore by running on the Green Party Ticket and not throwing his support to a fellow environmentalist; the Florida Secretary of State, a Republican naturally, stopped the re-count the moment George W. Bush was ahead; the Supreme Court then overruled the Florida State Supreme Court’s order to continue with a manual recount of the ballots, something the US Constitution (Article 1, Section 4)  states the Supreme Court does not have the right to do – and then, in a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court rushed through an underhanded process to throw the election to Bush: not even a proper ruling, rather a tricky per curiam decision (unsigned and without an opinion).  So instead of an environmental campaigner, the US and the world got Bush and Chaney fresh from the oil patch. Whence a horrible failure of US leadership: rather than taking the lead on combating climate change under Al Gore, in this century the US has pursued wars to (e.g. Iraq) to make the world safe for oil companies – in the process pouring its treasure into things military; awesome fact: over 50% of the US budget now goes to the military, highest ever in “peacetime.”

For more detail on Bush v. Gore, click HERE . For scholarship on the way the conservatives on the Roberts Court have turned these unsubstantiated decisions into a power tool for slickly deciding nearly 90% of cases, there is Stephen Vladeck’s recent book The Shadow Docket (2023).

Indeed, no one thinks of this period as part of an American Century anymore and the US with its military industrial complex seems hell bent on following the example of the Roman Empire; his work on the separation of powers by Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu inspired the US Founding Fathers but his analysis of the Fall of Rome seems to have gone unnoticed – except by military presidents George Washington and Dwight David Eisenhower.

Hard to believe but China was not bound by the Kyoto Protocol either because it was still considered a “developing nation” at that time. Ironically, the US and China are the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet, accounting for just less than 40% of global emissions. This mistake of letting the grandest polluters off the hook is not made in the Paris Climate Accords of 2015 which apply to the US, China and 190 other UN members. (Naturally, to enhance his MAGA image, Donald Trump had the US withdraw from this treaty in 2020 in another blow to US world leadership; the US rejoined in 2021, however.) The goals of the Paris Accords are ambitious and the target date of 2030 is only 6½ years away – it doesn’t look good seen from here.

In China, Europe, the US and elsewhere there is a move toward electric vehicles which looks promising. But all these efforts are not likely to help all that much with the melting of polar ice caps, sea level rise and the disappearance of multiple species – alas. Creepily, it seems that nothing can be done to prevent the release of immense amounts of the worst greenhouse gas of them all, methane, as the Siberian permafrost gives up the ghost. On a slightly positive note, if people in the Western nations stop eating beef, then the massive amounts of methane released by cow dung would be mitigated – but, honestly, great herds of cattle and beef eating are embedded in the psyche of the Indo-Europeans who moved west and are what motivated these herders to go from Persia to Europe to the Americas; so experts on the human condition hold little hope that people in Europe and the Americas will become vegetarians or pescatarians in time for it to have an impact – but who knows, in the late middle ages, the entire Kingdom of Poland switched from Indo-European Paganism to Christianity with a single royal decree (circa 966 A.D.) and this sort of thing has happened in many places; so an abrupt major transformation of society is possible after all.

It doesn’t stop: in other recent news, we have learned that in the US New York City is sinking and that in Indonesia Jakarta is sinking. Both are coastal cities which makes them more vulnerable to sea level change – the old river towns of Europe (Paris, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, …) are looking good all of a sudden. And then there are entire island nations (e.g. The Republic of the Maldives) and densely populated coastal areas (e.g. Bangladesh) which sea level rise will not spare. Closer to home, it will not spare the magnificent beaches of Cape Cod and other magical spots. Ineluctably, the list of recent and ongoing climate calamities goes on – torrential rains in Pakistan, giant hailstones (grelons géants) in the South of France in June, … .

What to do? Batten down the hatches: recycle, minimize use of plastic, move to electric vehicles, end energy plants powered by fossil fuels, stop jetting around, think of solar panels as roof jewelry, switch to heat pumps for heating, ….  To show some fight, Massachusetts has appointed Mellissa Hopper to be the nation’s first state climate chief. Reassuringly, she has a technocratic vision with myriad programs that she is getting started. Hopefully, it will prove more than a feel-good stunt. But climate projects invariably run into opposition: over 20 years ago in that same state of Massachusetts there was the pioneering and forward-looking Cape Wind project to put wind turbines in Nantucket Sound but Ted Kennedy put the kibosh on it because it might interfere with sailboat regattas off Cape Cod. To be honest the local Wampanoag Indian Tribe also opposed the project – nothing is simple anymore. But awareness of the climate crisis has become so keen that the Cape Wind project has taken on a new life and it looks like a version of it will go forward. Hope springs eternal.

More to come. Artificial Intelligence is up next.