The Environmental Crisis – Inequality and Economic Theory are major parts of the problem

When we see Earth from space, two things are apparent: humanity produces an enormous amount of light in the night portion of the view, and the globe appears to be enclosed by a thin blue veil. That veil is the atmosphere, but it can also be a metaphor for the biosphere which envelopes this rocky planet. The environmental crisis arises from our assaults on that biosphere. Image © iStock/buradaki, using elements from NASA.

Preamble

We live in a time of considerable uncertainty. The global environmental crisis is real, substantial, and multifaceted, and I think, becoming serious enough to deserve the word ‘existential’. It poses major risks for humanity in the relatively short term. Over the last couple of years, there has been a modest retreat in the commitment of nations, corporations and other influential entities to act to address this crisis. This retreat has taken place despite the growing pace at which the crisis is worsening. I would have expected strengthening rather than this weakening of resolve. Warming alone is occurring at a pace unseen since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a brief warm period 55 million years ago, well before humans were around to notice it.

Meanwhile, the global economy is changing very rapidly, driven by a still rapidly growing human population and technological innovations on multiple fronts that are rapid, large-scale and often disruptive to existing economic and societal patterns. Barriers to global trade, disappearing over several decades, now seem to be getting put back in place as individual nations or corporations seek to protect their own futures. And innovative products are being released to the market and therefore to the environment and to society with little in the way of proactive regulation to protect against unexpected risks. At a time when technological progress is rapid, when innovations can lead to major changes in products or processes as well as in the materials being created and released, governments seem less able than they once were to regulate such activities. The growth of AI technology is just the latest example of a radically new thing being invented and deployed widely without much evident thought about potential downsides.

On top of everything else, the distribution of wealth is shifting so that major portions of global wealth are held in the hands of a few ultra-rich individuals, and geopolitics seem to be shifting towards populist authoritarianism and away from more egalitarian societies.  We seem to be witnessing a collapse of the orderly system of relationships among governments that had been in place since shortly after World War II. Larger countries seem more willing to flex their muscles, while smaller nations are struggling to establish new ways to protect themselves in this new world.

If humanity is to avoid worst possible outcomes, there needs to be coherent and effective effort to put the battle against the environmental crisis back on track. While politics and economics are well outside my expertise, I am becoming persuaded that they are a major part of the environmental problem. This post is my attempt to set out a reasonable explanation for why the environmental crisis seems so intractable, and perhaps to suggest some sensible ways forward.

The state of the crisis

I am not going to develop a detailed description of the state of the environmental crisis. It is most evident, and most immediately impacting human societies, in our rapidly warming climate, but it is vitally important that we remember that the crisis has several other components beside climate change. All components are driven by our growing population and growing technological economy coupled to our generally held belief that the planet exists as a store of resources to be taken as needed, and as a reservoir to receive any and all of our waste products – physical, chemical and biological. The extent of the environmental crisis is well summarized on the Planetary Boundaries website maintained by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in the related Planetary Health Check 2025 produced by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Health Research, Potsdam, Germany, and in the 2017 paper in Bioscience by Bill Ripple of Oregon State University, seven co-authors and 15,364 scientists including many Nobel Laureates as well as yours truly. That short paper has one chilling set of graphs that show how rapidly we are changing the planet and in how many ways.

Nine graphs included in the World Scientists’ Warning of 2017. The message is that in many ways we are causing substantial deterioration in the state of the planet. Only the first, upper left, graph contains good news as it depicts the gradual reduction in emissions of CFCs – those refrigerant and fire-retardant chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer.
Image: WJ Ripple/BioScience.

These graphs need to be looked at while paying attention to the y-axis scales. Some of the changes depicted are far more extreme than others. Still, all are substantial changes to the planet. They are mostly changes in the way the biosphere is put together. It would be naïve to assume they do not matter. A related statistic that relates to graphs f and I is also worth mentioning. It is that humans and their livestock now constitute 96% of all vertebrate biomass on the planet. That is a phenomenal concentration of biomass in a single species and its cultivated livestock and represents an enormous disruption of food webs, energy flow and related dynamics of ecological systems.

Why has this crisis occurred?

In what follows, I am going to focus on climate change because this is one of the most pervasive changes and one that is immediately apparent to people. In doing so, I do not mean to suggest the other assaults on the biosphere are unimportant.

Humans are changing the climate primarily because we have been negligent in three ways that all increase the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This leads to warming, and warming leads directly to many other climatic changes and to ramifying environmental changes beyond that. Our three mistakes have been to massively exploit fossil fuels without abating the release of CO₂ and CH₄ to the atmosphere, to massively exploit technologies like cement manufacture that also release CO₂ without any abatement, and to massively deforest land and convert much open land to urban use, thereby reducing the planet’s capacity to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Despite the fact that there has been an enormous effort and considerable success in developing green energy sources and in stemming deforestation, global delivery of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere through human activity has continued to grow. This paradox arises because our global economy has been growing by leaps and bounds as populations grow and as communities climb slowly out of poverty. As fast as we add new green energy, our demand for energy increases. The recent surge in AI development and the related need for data centers is the latest development in our tendency to continually increase our use of energy. And we are now entering a time when the changing climate has increased the risk of wildfire to the extent that many forests are becoming sources of greenhouse gases instead of sinks. In other words, we may have reached a tipping point for climate when forces beyond our control take over to continue increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and resultant warming.

Why did we let this happen?

While our effort to reduce use of fossil fuels has been immense, it could have been a lot stronger. We started late, given that the first public warnings that continued use of fossil fuels could lead to unwanted climate change occurred in the early 1970s. And large fractions of the population did not take climate change seriously.

People who have followed my thinking on this topic will know I initially was confronted by the reality of climate change because I worked with coral reefs throughout my career. But I did not wake up to what was happening until the first circumtropical coral bleaching event occurred during the major el Niño in 1998. Until then I thought that coral bleaching was just an interesting fact about corals.

Bleached staghorn coral at Lizard Island, Australia. These fish will not continue living here now that the coral has bleached severely. Photo © J. Rummer/James Cook University.

Initially, I thought, as did many other reef scientists, that just explaining to people that continuing climate change was going to eliminate living coral reefs from the planet would be the argument that would galvanize the world into action to bring climate change under control. After all, how could we countenance the deliberate elimination of an entire ecosystem from the planet and still consider ourselves ethical beings?

I wrote a book in 2011, trying to explain the environmental crisis. Lots of environmental scientists did the same, and some were far more influential than I was. But understanding the details turned out to not be the problem.

I began to think that humanity was not really responding to the environmental crisis because we did not relate closely enough to the natural world. I wrote a second book in 2021 in which I tried to make coral reefs relatable. I hoped people would become emotionally attached to coral reefs and therefore care about their plight – one small step in getting people committed to the fate of the natural world. My modest effort had very limited results. Covid was grabbing people’s attention and there was little room to worry about how coral reefs were doing.

More recently, I have recognized that the environmental crisis is so multifaceted and so enormous that many of us feel powerless as individuals to do anything. Not being able to make a real difference individually, many of us do not act. In this, we forget the power of collective action.

A related problem with the environmental crisis is that mostly it is proceeding quite slowly – at least by human standards. Its pace is alarmingly fast compared to most geological processes, but humans are not very good at detecting or responding to slowly worsening crises.

Misinformation and disinformation

The story of the environmental crisis has not been put forward in a world without competing messages. As well as plenty of messages about all sorts of things other than the environment, there has always been abundant messaging that directly contradicts the idea that this crisis exists.

To begin with, humanity has plenty of stories that teach us we are the chosen species. Sometimes they teach that some humans, members of a particular social or cultural group, are chosen above all the rest of us (and certainly above other species). These stories are important parts of our cultural heritage, a heritage that provides each of us with specific, deeply held beliefs. Widespread though not universal among the major religions, beliefs that the planet is here for us, or beliefs that a higher being, or beings, have a special interest in us, lead easily to a belief that really bad things – such as widespread ecological collapse and resulting civilizational collapse or outright human extinction – will never happen. Despite the evidence that the great majority of species that have ever lived are already extinct, large numbers of people assume that humanity will go on forever, becoming ever more technologically advanced and potentially colonizing the rest of the universe. As a species, we do have big egos.

Such individuals are predisposed to reject a story that says we are damaging the planetary ecological system through our overuse of resources and our thoughtless release of unwanted products or substances that damage land, water and air. Their responses to stories about the environmental crisis start with denial. The scientists are mistaken. Or they grudgingly accept that disturbing changes are happening but deny we cause them. The idea that everything changes in orderly cycles is a favorite argument here. Finally, they get round to accepting that we are causing environmental changes, but they assume those changes will be self-correcting, or we will develop new technology to solve any future problems.

It can be frightening to be confronted with stories about how we are causing serious harm to the planetary system. It is not surprising that many people seek to explain away the data, such as rising levels of greenhouse gases, that supported those stories. In questioning the science, many people throw up alternative hypotheses – alternative stories – that lead to a rosier future for us. Many of those alternative stories gained some widespread acceptance in certain quarters. But they usually contain misinformation or misinterpretations of otherwise valid information. And they slow any tendency to accept the environmental crisis as real.

Such problems with lack of receptivity from the audience would be difficult enough to deal with were it not for the abundant disinformation on these topics. Some members of society deliberately provide counter arguments – alternative stories – despite knowing these counter arguments are untrue. Who these people are, and why they create these arguments are questions best answered by considering the place of environment in our social and economic structures.

Far too often, when we think of the biosphere, we see it as ‘out there’, without people, or even under the control of people. The biosphere does not exist for our convenience – we exist because of, and as part of it. Photo © Peter Sale.

The place of environment in our economic system

For whatever reason, and in contrast to the perspectives of many other societies, our prevailing global social system of materialism, markets and money is designed with the natural environment on the outside, not part of the system. This is true for ‘western’ societies with a democratic or quasi-democratic system of government, but it is also true for centrally guided societies such as China and Russia. For all of these, apart from cases where there are specific exceptions created by governments through laws or similar edicts, environment serves as an ultimate source of raw materials to be taken as needed, and a repository for unwanted materials, by-products and waste. Using the environment to acquire raw materials or to dispose of wastes carries no economic or social costs.

Technological advance has permitted many good things including the wealth necessary to sustain large populations in relative health and with good quality of life. But the objectification of environment has resulted in economic systems in which environmental overuse and environmental pollution both come at no economic cost. Our use of environmental goods and services, including the assimilation of otherwise polluting wastes, incur debt to the environment which is never paid off and which also never appears in any economic accounting. That collective debt has been increasing massively.

A more holistic and scientifically more accurate view, that we are inextricably embedded within the environment and that how we use other facets of environment matters culturally, is widely held in indigenous societies around the world. These societies have either never developed energy- and materials-intensive economies or have lost this holistic perspective as they have shifted towards a materialistic, consumerist system. This holistic perspective is worth resurrecting.

Consequences of this world view

So how did we get to here? With the prevailing view of environment as external to the economy, we initially used resources with little concern about the environment’s capacity to provide, and disposed of wastes, without much thought for the environment’s capacity to process those wastes. As industrialization progressed, local resource shortages and local pollution problems became apparent, and laws were then drafted to control economic behavior to ensure it did not impact other people either directly or through some sort of environmental degradation.

There is an enormous difference between acting as if every action will have environmental impacts which must be dealt with and acting as if anything goes in terms of how you use environment until you exceed some limit set by laws designed to protect other people – yesterday’s law, based on scientific understanding (usually incomplete) of the day before. The first seeks from the start to protect environment; the second ignores the environment until damage is sufficient that it impacts other people sufficiently that it must be dealt with. Damage to the functioning of the ecological system that does not unambiguously impact other people and which is not unambiguously due to the particular economic activity, rarely gets regulated. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a valuable tradition, but it can allow the obviously guilty to go Scot free until scientific advances remove that ambiguity.

In other words, our economic and legal systems are set up in such a way that it is appropriate for economic players to overuse or mistreat environment until the overuse or mistreatment is severe or widespread enough to become unambiguously damaging to other people. Damage to environment itself is unimportant, because of our objectified, inanimate view of environment. Is it surprising that leaders within those corporations that extracted and refined fossil fuels would not be thinking carefully about possible damage to the climate? Is it surprising that they would also not want to know about the likelihood of such damage?

Disinformation is a logical outcome

Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University is a historian of science. Her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, was a monumental exposé of how the community of major fossil fuel corporations acted to sow doubt about the link between greenhouse gases and climate warming. Internal documents reveal that Exxon personnel knew by the 1970’s that continued development and use of fossil fuels would lead to substantial global climate change. Oreskes traces how corporate decisions kept this information private, provided alternative stories, funded outside groups and individuals to generate and disseminate alternative stories, and generally operated, in an at least loosely coordinated way in a three-pronged attack on the whole idea that humanity was altering global climate.

First, they denied the accuracy of the science. Then they provided alternative seemingly scientific explanations that exonerated humans from complicity. Third, they participated in a scattergun delivery of multiple alternative stories, conspiracy theories, personal attacks on climate scientists and others that overwhelmed the ability of the public to sift through the complex arguments with the result that many people decided that the climate was not changing, or if it was, nobody knew why.

Oreskes demonstrated that the fossil majors were essentially using the tobacco industry’s playbook successfully to deny and then delay any effective action on climate change. Along the way, notably within the US, climate change also became a political football making it even more difficult for people to discern the truth. Oreskes has continued to write on this subject, and the battles continue.

One example of the lengths to which the fossil fuel industry has gone to fight any perception that their actions have been a major factor in causing the current rapid increase in global temperatures is in the numbers of fossil fuel lobbyists and corporate interests who frequent the halls of Washington DC or take part in global UN climate conferences. At the 2025 COP30 in Brazil, the 1600 fossil fuel lobbyists attending outnumbered delegates from any single country except host Brazil and represented 1/25^th of all delegates registered.

The fight to delay action on climate change is not just fought by the industry. Nations which have significant fossil fuel industries often see delay as in their own short-term best interest. Working closely with the industry as texts of draft agreements are edited, these countries have been able to keep mention of the words gas, oil and coal almost completely missing from final agreements.

Why governments have been slow to act – the problem of inequality

In the final analysis it is government, through its capacity to enact and enforce laws that should ensure that damaging behavior, by individuals and by corporations, is prevented, bad actors are punished, and impacts of damaging behavior are rectified. Setting aside the natural inclinations of people to not believe we are causing existential damage to the planet, and the evidence of bad actors peddling disinformation to confuse and thereby slow any action to redress our problems, it is abundantly clear that governments have not been acting as if the environmental crisis is a problem in need of urgent action.

As just noted, nations in which the fossil fuel industry is a major part of the economy have certainly had one foot on the brakes where issues like climate change are concerned. But most governments exist in a state of gentle internal conflict as one set of priorities vies with another, so where are the government voices that would support taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for example? Why has the move towards green energy been so painfully tentative? One reason is that taking action to reduce impacts on climate has zero immediate benefit for the social group that chooses to act. This is not action that wins votes. But I think there is a larger reason.

This cartoon from 2016 shows starkly the extent of inequality then. But things are far worse now. Image © Matt Wuerker/Politico

I think that the prevailing materialistic economic system, as well as objectifying environment and ignoring growing environmental debts, is also built to reward the few at the expense of the many. In the societies we have built, creativity, innovation, risk-taking, and interpersonal leadership skills, along with advantage due to birth and social connection, are rewarded in a number of ways – income security, accumulating and high net worth, ability to acquire tokens signaling status, and access to elite membership. These successful few are the leaders of industry, of governments, and of the non-governmental organizations that define a society or a nation. And, perhaps especially important, the level of inequality in societies has been growing rapidly such that in 2026, the top 10% of people earn more than the remaining 90%, and the 50% of people with less than the average income earn just 10% of all money earned. Wealth distribution is even less equal: the top 10% hold three quarters of all wealth while the bottom 50% own just 2% of wealth.

The 2026 World Inequality Report makes the point that these enormous differences in status are not limited to income and wealth. There is substantial inequality among regions and between genders, and the inequality extends to access to education or medical care and to avoidance of impacts from climate change among many other measures. The extent of inequality has been increasing rapidly and we now live in a world in which some 60,000 multimillionaires, the top 0.001%, own 6% of all wealth, three times that owned by the bottom 50%. Their relative wealth has increased 50% from 1995 when they held 4% of all wealth.

Graph from World Inequality Report 2026 showing how the wealth of the top 0.001% has grown more rapidly than that of the bottom 50%. They now hold over 6% of all personal wealth.

The wealthy and powerful are the least likely to be directly impacted by climate change, or indeed any portion of the environmental crisis. And these are the people who guide decision making around the world. Growing inequality makes resolution of environmental problems difficult.

Is there a way out of this mess?

So where do we go from here? A collapse of the global economy would curtail greenhouse gas emissions, as witness what happened during the height of the covid crisis, but an economic breakdown would likely exacerbate most other impacts of the environmental crisis. And a total breakdown would likely be followed by years of chaos as one or another strongman (always men) exerted power over portions of the globe.

Conversely, depending on the essential goodness of humanity is what we have been trying for decades and it does not seem to be working. And while I am sure there are good billionaires, I don’t see many signs that the good ones have substantial influence. An all out assault on materialism, coupled with concerted efforts in many countries to bring in tax and other policies to aggressively ensure that accumulated wealth is used to address environmental ills, may provide a solution. We could begin by demanding that a sizeable portion of the growth on capital – whether in private hands, in corporate accounts, or in government coffers – be used now to begin to restore the global environment. This would require grass roots activism and global commitments among nations on a scale we have yet to see.

Several recent books provide new insight into our essential oneness with the rest of the natural world. Among these is Togetherness by Rowan Hooper, which provides a detailed overview of current understanding of the importance of symbioses in most aspects of organization of the biosphere. Growing awareness of the inadequacy of our current economic and philosophical perspectives which place us firmly outside, and often in charge of, nature could provide a new impetus to change how the human project functions. This could power a resurgence of holistic and nature-positive attitudes and behaviors that could allow us to pull ourselves back from the precipice.

Short of this we may have to endure massive ecosystem collapse, with its resulting impacts on the survivorship of populations, in the hope that what emerges from the disaster will prove more capable of building civilizations that properly manage human impacts on the planet. A long time ago, Linnaeus named us Homo sapiens, the wise ape. We’ve used our wisdom in many ways and achieved great things. But we have failed dismally to recognize our essential ties to the rest of the biosphere. We need to rediscover the knowledge that many societies have built and use it to bring our planet back from the precipice.

• Facebook
• Bluesky
• Mastodon
• LinkedIn
• X

Search

Search