I haven’t written for the Business Post in a couple of years, so returned in late June with the below piece, which they headlined: ‘We must stop celebrating climate destroyers as captains of industry’. Among the topics covered was Trump’s deranged all-out assault on science, not just climate science, but the actual life-and-death science of weather forecasting. Sure enough, deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service came home to bite in the early hours of July 4th, as catastrophic flooding in Texas led to over 100 deaths (some 27 positions in the NWS office in Austin/San Antonio are currently listed as vacant). Expect to see more and more instances of ordinary people being abandoned to their fate as climate-fuelled weather disasters intensify worldwide.
IF YOU’VE BEEN finding the daily news bulletins difficult to face lately, you’re by no means alone. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the world is rapidly descending in a new dark age of Idiocracy – one dominated by deranged politicians, predatory corporations and billionaire narcissists who have largely disengaged from objective reality.
In the process, the rich fruits of a century and more of scientific progress and human development have been flung into the furnace of history.
One week from now, the US government’s most important climate resource will be shut down. The website, Climate.gov, has been operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) to convey crucial scientific and weather information to the public. (Clicking the above link now takes you to the Noaa ‘climate’ section instead, which includes a notice explaining how the site, under an Executive Order, has been taken down. In the ‘News’ section on this site, the latest post is dated June 12, suggesting the site is effectively being abandoned).
Noaa has played a vital role in tracking storms and helping communities to brace for impacts of hurricanes in particular. As its remit also includes climate research and modelling, it has now fallen under Donald Trump’s anti-climate fatwa, which has slashed billions of dollars from critical climate and weather research programmes.
Fossil fuel firms spent well over €400 million in the last US election cycle to lobby Trump and to buy off politicians in the US Congress. It has turned out to be a shrewd investment. During 2024, banks pledged a record level of investment in oil, gas and coal projects, at over €800 billion, up a quarter on the previous year. The same bankers have since quietly walked away from their highly publicised ‘climate pledges’ made in recent years.
In the decade since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change set urgent global limits on fossil fuel exploration and consumption, around €7.5 trillion has been poured by banks worldwide into fossil fuel infrastructure and investment.
The world’s largest corporations have directly caused a staggering €25 trillion in climate damages in recent decades, with half that total attributable to just 10 fossil fuel corporations, according to a study released in April. While the vast profits these companies make ends up enriching shareholders and executives, the crippling costs are offloaded onto the general public in the form of pollution and climate-fuelled extreme weather events.
This is just for starters. Research published in 2023 found that global heating of 2.7ºC would expose around two billion people to annual mean temperatures above 29ºC. For context, this is the equivalent to the hottest parts of the Sahara Desert today. As a result of these deadly temperatures, between one and two billion people would be forced to migrate to cooler regions to survive, and food production in these areas would likely collapse.
Further evidence of the threat posed to global food production came in research published in the top journal Nature this week. It warned that some of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions will suffer major declines in output as temperatures continue to climb and extreme weather events intensify. Global wheat and maize production may fall by around 40%, with devastating consequence for billions of people.
The vice is already tightening. In 2023, almost half of the Earth’s land area experienced at least one month of extreme drought. This is three times the area affected by drought in the 1980s. Europe is heating up at twice the global average, according to a 2024 assessment report from the European Environment Agency. Its conclusions were stark: “If decisive action is not taken now, most climate risks identified could reach critical or catastrophic levels by the end of this century. Hundreds of thousands of people would die from heatwaves, and economic losses from coastal floods alone could exceed €1 trillion”.
The warnings of climate scientists and activists have long been ignored, but one voice that may be far more difficult to dismiss is that of the insurance and reinsurance industry. A board member of global insurance giant, Allianz SE, Günther Thallinger recently warned bluntly that the climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism.
As temperature increases approach 3ºC, the damage will be so severe that the global insurance industry will be overwhelmed. This is already happening, Thallinger noted, as “entire regions are becoming uninsurable”. Even governments will be unable to cover the losses, as entire asset classes are wiped out, triggering a global economic collapse. “The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable”.
Violent weather inflicted over $2 trillion in damages in the past decade, with $450 billion occurring in just the last two years. The only possible solution, Thallinger added, is to eliminate all fossil fuel burning as quickly as possible and deploy renewable energy as an urgent global priority.
In a rational world, these dire warnings would be routinely front page news, with business leaders, media and politicians working together to address this existential crisis. We do not live in a rational world. Rather than hitting the brakes, we are actually accelerating towards oblivion.
For instance, the global aviation industry’s growth plans will see its emissions double by mid-century. In Ireland, the state-owned DAA has been lobbying to increase passenger numbers through Dublin Airport by a quarter, to 40 million a year, a move that would see emissions grow by a ruinous 22%.
Rather than being publicly vilified as reckless and selfish, the people fuelling this tragedy are instead feted as captains of industry and job creators whom we should applaud and admire. As one climate scientist observed sombrely: “we live in an age of fools”.
