Life Support on Spaceship Earth
It has been 36 years since America’s top climate scientist testified before Congress on a hot June day that global climate change is real and is already well underway. NASA’s James Hansen warned the legislators that the consequences would be dire if humanity fails to address the problem. Six months later, Time magazine gave its prestigious person-of-the-year cover to “The Planet.” Four years afterward, President George H. W. Bush signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Brazil. The momentum had clearly shifted. But it did not last. In the following decades, there arose a now-familiar refrain: We have most of the technologies we need to confront climate change, but we lack the political will to use them. It has been an acknowledgment of fatalism instead of a plan to create the political will necessary to preserve the habitability and sustainability of the biosphere—something we know how to do.
Now, economic necessity arising from a number of factors is changing political will. The world is finally turning to renewable energy sources that have been freely and abundantly available for billions of years and will be around billions more. Solar energy is the principal such resource and the root of several others, including wind and water. “What a source of power,” Thomas Edison said of sunlight in 1931. “I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
In 2024, solar power is finally enjoying a virtuous cycle of a kind that Edison might have predicted. The more we use it, the less expensive it becomes. Since the 1960s, the break-even cost has dropped by a factor of more than 1,000, putting it near the cost of fossil fuel sources without even accounting for the reduction in numerous pollutants we want to get rid of. The International Energy Agency predicts it will become civilization’s largest primary energy source by the 2040s. That goal, however, is optimistic. Powerful forces oppose the conversion of the energy economy to renewable sources, slowing the needed transition, especially in the United States. The need is dire and the economics are clear, but humanity remains addicted to fossil fuels.
The climate crisis was not the only one identified at the Earth Summit. 150 world leaders also signed the Convention on Biodiversity. But in the 32 years since, the trend of population growth and resource depletion damaging the Earth’s critical ecosystems has only gotten worse. Geologists recently identified a long list of “perturbations” creating irreversible damage to the biosphere. They conclude that humanity is now the dominant force on the planet, with very negative impacts. Geologists, of course, famously divide Earth’s history into epochs. Last February, the top echelon of the profession considered a proposal that the planet has entered the Anthropocene, a new era caused by our species’ effects. They rejected the proposal, but only because our perturbations are too new when viewed on geological time scales that usually span millions of years.
With the stability of ecosystems, we find ourselves in the same situation as with global warming—and it’s more than a labeling exercise. We know how to deal with most of these ecological problems—many simply require that we stop bad behavior—but we lack the political will to defy the powerful special interests that profit from them or otherwise benefit from the status quo.
Those powerful interests include—but are not limited to—large corporations. In the United States, the federal government’s ability to protect Americans from pollution and environmental degradation is often undermined by regulatory capture—the undue influence of industries on Congress, the courts, and agencies. This is nothing new. In 1972, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas warned that the government’s regulatory agencies are “notoriously under the control of powerful interests who manipulate them.”
Business influence has grown even faster since 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporate monetary contributions to election campaigns are a form of free speech and can’t be limited. In 2024, in the first half of the year, the oil-and-gas industry used more than 660 lobbyists and spent nearly $72 million to influence climate and energy policy, according to the nonpartisan research group Open Secrets.
To date, presidential administrations in the United States and governments of nations worldwide have produced scores of agreements and goals to slow and reverse those human “perturbations,” particularly regarding the goals of achieving sustainable development and thwarting the threats of global warming and biodiversity loss. Hundreds of local governments and business leaders have signed on. But while we are awash in aspirations, we need more results, and much of the battle to act in time has shifted from Congress to the courts. We should assess why Congress, with some important exceptions, has largely stopped making environmental protection policy.
In the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Congress intended to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.” These many years later, civilization is still creating more dissonance than harmony, and the body of laws Congress passed during the “environmental decade” that followed the passage of NEPA is under performing.
The Clean Air Act cut emissions of the six most common pollutants by 78 percent between 1970 and 2020, according to EPA. Yet in 2023, nearly four in 10 of us still lived where breathing is dangerous. More than 250,000 live near facilities in what some observers have called “sacrifice zones,” where the risk of cancer is above EPA’s acceptable levels. In 2020, a study published by the Journal of the American Chemical Society found that air quality is associated with as many as 200,000 deaths annually in the United States. We treat these casualties as acceptable collateral damage to the needs of the economy.
The Safe Drinking Water Act has also failed to live up to its sponsors’ expectations of protecting public health. In 2023, the U.S. Geological Service reported that one or more of 12,000 “forever chemicals” appear in at least 45 percent of America’s tap water. For the first time in its 21-year history of surveys, the American Water Works Association ranks “watershed and source water protection” rather than aging infrastructure as its top concern. More than fifty years after passage of the Endangered Species Act by a nearly unanimous Congress, NatureServe, a network of over one thousand U.S. scientists, reported that more than a third of species and ecosystems in the United States are at risk of disappearing.
Many factors account for the undermining of the bedrock statutes, including agencies’ lack of enforcement, market failures, and industry malfeasance. One important factor, consumers who reward industry with their dollars, is beyond the scope of this article.
However, it is clear that the vast majority of America’s major corporations remain far out of tune in the national effort to achieve NEPA’s harmony. Especially under current campaign finance laws, their political influence is formidable. And now, in its war against the “administrative state,” the Supreme Court is chopping away at EPA’s ability to regulate pollution. Every June comes a new environmental precedent—several this year. In effect, the justices are making the fringe economic doctrine long associated with Milton Friedman, that corporations’ only responsibility is to make profits, into the law of the land.
In a perfect world, businesses would self-regulate, and there would be little need for an administrative state. That is not the case today. The Congressional Budget Office says U.S. manufacturers’ emissions will grow 17 percent between now and mid-century. Worldwide, factories produce 450 million metric tons of plastics annually, much of it ending up in the environment. The World Counts, a website focusing on global environmental challenges, says the number of artificial chemicals grew 40,000 percent in one generation, including 700 substances now found in humans but “not supposed to be there.”
Yet, if corporations are a principal cause of the world’s environmental stresses, they can also be a large part of the solution. As ecologist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken points out, “There is only one institution on Earth large enough, powerful enough, pervasive enough, and influential enough to really lead humankind in a different direction. And that is the institution of business and industry.” But they must shed economic dogma, stop dismissing consumer concerns as “woke,” and embrace environmental, social, and governance policies. For their part, governments must address the environmental outcomes of the tax and other incentives they offer corporations, many of which are out of alignment with society’s goal of sustainable development.
In recent years, some presidents have attempted to compensate for Congress’s environmental inaction by using executive orders and interpreting regulations broadly. But these policies are impermanent, subject to change as new administrations take over. So, with the legislative and executive branches either inactive or inconsistent, courts have become the venue for corporations wishing to attack environmental constraints, and environmentalists hoping to create measures for sustainability.. The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law is tracking nearly 2,260 federal and state legal actions related to global warming in the United States alone.
According to the New York Times, many lawsuits are part of a “coordinated multi-year strategy by Republican attorneys general and conservative allies” to diminish EPA’s regulatory authorities. Other interested parties have filed their own suits.
In a series of recent decisions, the Supreme Court invoked the little-used “major questions doctrine” to rule that EPA can’t use its discretion to interpret environmental laws when an action may have large consequences not explicitly intended by Congress (West Virginia v. EPA, 2022). It overturned the 40-year-old Chevron precedent that said courts must defer to reasonable agency judgments on how laws are implemented (Loper Bright v. Raimondo, 2024). The justices halted an EPA rule to limit air pollution from upwind power plants that crosses into other states (Ohio v. EPA, 2024). And the Court effectively eliminated the statute of limitations on corporate challenges to federal regulations (Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2024). The general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund called this recent spate “a series of decisions unlike any before in American history.”
Litigation also has become a recourse for governments trying to enforce the polluter pays principle by seeking compensatory damages from major oil companies. Since 2017, more than thirty U.S. states and municipalities have sued oil-and-gas companies to recover the costs of rising sea levels and extreme weather linked with global warming. Other states and cities allege with substantial documented evidence that the industry covered up its own science, misled the public, and used its influence to defeat legislation like carbon pricing. California has amended its lawsuit to require oil companies to give up the profits they made while deceiving consumers.
Because conservative justices are likely to dominate the Supreme Court for years to come, the assault on the federal government’s ability to protect the health and welfare of the American people will continue during the most critical years of opportunity to confront existential environmental problems. This is the battlefield on which environmental professionals find themselves almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
The environmental sciences make clear that humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature has reached an inflection point. To paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, the question is whether we will be architects of the future or its victims. If the former, we will have to be bold and consider—and adopt—policies and principles that are still on the fringe of environmental law as it is applied today.
We will have to redefine progress and measure it differently, insulate environmental principles and rights from leadership changes, and make NEPA’s vision—America’s official enacted federal environmental policy—the organizing principle of the economy. The United States must fully implement its bedrock laws and lead on the environmental world stage. Much of the needed leadership must come from the environmental profession.
James Gustav Speth, who cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute, writes about the need for a “new system of political economy.” Its objectives should be to fix what’s fixable in the world’s ecosystems, restore their services to society, and implement a regenerative economy. Ecosystem restoration is now a prominent international objective and an emerging economic sector in its own right. In 2014, environmental economist Robert Costanza led a study of 17 ecosystems around the globe and concluded they provided services worth $145 trillion in 2011. However, Costanza and his team found the world had lost as much as $20 trillion in ecosystem services due to land-use changes like deforestation, agriculture, and urbanization.
In 2015, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied the costs and benefits of ecosystem restoration in the United States. The activity had created 221,000 jobs and produced $24.5 billion in annual economic output at that time—numbers sure to have grown. A year later, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston confirmed the findings and attributed these benefits to 25 federal laws and environmental regulations. In addition, ecological restoration produced more than $1 billion in local and state tax revenues and more than $2 billion in federal revenues in 2014. Again, these numbers are sure to be larger today.
In 2021, the United Nations launched a “decade of ecosystem restoration . . . an opportunity to reimagine our relationships with our environment and with each other.” The next year, 196 nations agreed to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land, fresh water, and marine areas by 2030. More than 80 percent of Europe’s habitats are in poor condition, so this past June the EU adopted the world’s first nature restoration law. It sets legally binding targets for member nations to preserve and restore natural habitats in at least a fifth of Europe’s land and sea areas by 2030 and to repair all damaged ecosystems by mid-century.
The larger goal is a regenerative global economy. It would increasingly rely on renewable resources and extend the life of finite resources by recycling and reusing them. The European Commission set an example by adopting a circular economy action plan in 2020.
The authors of America’s state and national constitutions could not have envisioned what the world would be like nearly a quarter of a millennium later, including the existential threats to life caused by humanity’s own hubris. We should update state and national constitutions to address modern realities. The right to life implies not only a stable climate but also the right to the resources necessary to sustain life. As we’ve seen, today’s statutes and regulations are insufficient to guarantee clean air, clean water, healthy soils and oceans, a stable climate, and protection of the planet’s safe ecological operating spaces.
It is time to codify the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence says these rights are inalienable, but they are not guaranteed in the federal Constitution or in practice. In Juliana v. United States, 21 young plaintiffs have been unsuccessful in an eight-year battle to establish that federal energy policies that contribute to climate change violate these supposedly inalienable rights. The preambles of several U.S. laws—NEPA chief among them—mention the well-being of future generations but rarely as enforceable rights. The United States should follow the example of more than 40 percent of UN member states whose constitutions reference the rights of future generations.
Nature’s rights were defended in 1972 by Justice Douglas in his dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton. “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation,” he wrote. “The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled.” Nature’s intrinsic rights have been established or proposed in 11 nations. By one count, more than 30 American localities have adopted rights of nature policies, but no U.S. court has yet upheld them.
Changes like these require legislation, administrative action, and even constitutional amendments. But what do we do about a conservative Supreme Court that seems to serve corporate rather than national interests? The Supreme Court is not exempt from checks and balances. The Constitution allows jurisdiction stripping, where Congress puts specific topics off-limits to federal courts and, therefore, not subject to appellate review by the Supreme Court. Recently, members of Congress have introduced bills to set term limits or mandatory retirement ages for justices. The United States is the only major democracy without them. These changes would result in more frequent turnover on the Supreme Court and presumably prevent any ideology to dominate for long, But ultimately, 21st century threats to the biosphere require consistent policy responses and the understanding among potential polluters that environmental protection will not go away. That means changes in the Constitution, along with environmental education that builds overwhelming and stable public support for enlightened policies, along with a social contract that emphasizes personal responsibility for stewardship.
As we know, planet-wide threats like biodiversity loss and global warming require international responses. There, too, we are awash in good intentions but short on results. The international community has created over 3,700 existing environmental treaties, conventions, and pledges, some dating back to the 1850s. However, compliance is usually voluntary because governments are unwilling to cede sovereignty to international enforcement. For example, countries have agreed to benchmark Sustainable Development Goals. However, in May, the United Nations warned that only 17 percent of the goals were on track, and over a third were stalled or sliding backward. “It is time to sound the alarm,” the UN said.
The Paris Agreement on climate change has generated some progress, but it is too little and possibly too late. Last year, Climate Action Tracker, a group that monitors compliance with the Paris goals, reported that work was “lagging significantly behind the pace and scale that is necessary to address the climate crisis.” In 2023, the planet exceeded the agreement’s goal to keep warming at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It was the first time global warming had exceeded the Paris goal for an entire year. 2024 is on track to do it again.
One option is to require nations to show transparently how they enforce their treaty commitments in their domestic laws, constitutions, and markets—and to periodically measure and report progress. Economist William Nordhaus proposes another enforcement tool: “climate clubs”—bilateral or multilateral agreements among treaty-compliant countries to penalize noncomplying nations with trade exclusion and other sanctions.
Environmental stewardship requires major market reforms. If the prices of goods and resources accurately reflected their actual costs to the economy, society, and the environment, there would be far less need for government mandates and regulations. Market signals would do the job. However, government subsidies distort price signals, along with the society’s practice of externalizing the costs of pollution cleanup, ecological degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, damages to public health, lost productivity, and so on.
These unpriced costs can be massive. The International Monetary Fund calculated that global fossil fuel subsidies reached $7 trillion annually in 2022, when it counted social and environmental impacts. The IMF predicts these public subsidies will rise to $8.2 trillion by 2030. Subsidies in the United States during 2022 totaled $757 billion, or $2,243, for every American. If market forces had been allowed to work unimpeded by these supports, clean energy would have started eliminating carbon emissions generations ago.
Now, nations are implementing ways to internalize the total costs of fossil fuels, such as accounting for the “social costs of carbon,” creating carbon taxes, allowing emissions trading, and charging border taxes. Nations must avoid pushback by using recaptured revenues from subsidy reforms to offset higher energy prices.
It is time to redefine growth. GDP is an inadequate indicator of human progress. It doesn’t measure most things that matter because it tracks only economic activity, not the quality of that activity and its noneconomic effects on our lives.
Countries and organizations have devised alternatives, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index, the Inclusive Wealth Report, the Happy Planet Index, Gross National Happiness, and the Ecological Footprint. The United States should work with other countries to synthesize these into a universal metric on the well-being of people and the planet—and to adopt appropriate policies.
We must make changes like these because it is dangerous to rely on technology innovation to avoid or solve ecological crises. The promise of innovation can be misused as an excuse to delay hard decisions and necessarily disruptive change. For example, researchers have concluded that most of the world’s remaining recoverable reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas must remain in the ground to avoid irreversible warming. Oil reserves represent tens of trillions of dollars of the petroleum industry’s value, and firms are understandably reluctant to abandon that much profit. So, after years of deliberately spreading climate denial, the industry shifted to a technical fix called carbon capture and sequestration. CCS traps and buries carbon dioxide from power plants and industry before the gas escapes into the atmosphere. But it is far more expensive than zero-carbon energy from sunlight and wind. It is unlikely to ever be commercially competitive in comparison with renewables, except in very limited uses. Rather than a solution, it is an excuse for fossil-energy companies to keep profiting from global warming.
Exotic forms of geoengineering are examples of trying to change nature’s behavior rather than humanity’s. Geoengineering schemes include fertilizing oceans to grow phytoplankton that absorbs carbon or reducing the sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by deploying giant mirrors, sulfur dioxide particles, millions of tiny bubbles, or even moon dust in space. Ideas like these are rife with potential unintended consequences as we manipulate natural processes we don’t fully understand. That, of course, is what has got us into trouble in the first place.
Spaceship Earth has been especially hospitable to human civilization over the last 12,000 years, but in just 250 years of industrialization—and especially in the half century since the first Earth Day—we have altered the conditions on which life depends. Now, we must make a major course correction and go boldly where no industrial society has gone before.
MALFUNCTION ALERT The planet’s climate and the biosphere—two synergistic systems—are addressed in important treaties, but the forces that threaten them are still supported by symbiotically linked governments and corporations
