By Franz Baumann*
This essay was originally published online on 2 November 2026 in Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Taylor & Francis, under the title “While the World Burns …” DOI: 10.1080/00139157.2026.2725625.
VIENNA | 6 November 2026 (IDN) — “Our house is on fire while we avert our eyes. Nature, mutilated and plundered, can no longer regenerate and we refuse to admit it.”—President Jacques Chirac at the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa
Barry Commoner, the founder of Taylor & Francis Online, defined the Four Laws of Ecology in 1971:
Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
Everything must go somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.
Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
How prescient, how pertinent, how urgent! Climate change—caused by the burning of fossil fuels—triggers ever more disastrous droughts, fires, storms, and floods across the entire world. These calamities are the overdue invoice for humanity’s profligate emissions of the past decades that have not yet been paid for.
Globally, the average temperature is about 1.5°C above that of the 19th century, and the first halves of 2026, 2025, and 2024 were the hottest on record. Greenhouse gas emissions keep rising.
Fire risks have increased significantly. The risks from 1.5°C to 2°C heating will become higher still, and we are on track for 2.7°C of heating.
At the time of writing—the first week of August 2026—nearly 50,000 wildfires burn globally, of which over 34,000 are out of control. The worst in modern history. Wildfires kill about 1.5 million people annually.
They are no longer early warning systems or the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Just like the droughts, the floods, the heat waves, the storms, and the smoke-choked cities, these infernos are also not the new normal but something much worse, namely, the opening salvoes of the massive forthcoming climate impacts, such as heat and smoke deaths, harvest failures, drowned cities, water and migration wars.
Hot House Earth, as long predicted, is no longer a possible scenario, but a probable one. Feared, although often not predicted as too gruesome a scenario, is the concomitantly dissipating world order.
So, here we are. It becomes ever clearer that climate change is the greatest global public policy challenge humanity has ever faced, and that it is not an inevitable natural phenomenon, but the result of human choices.
Future historians will interpret the tenacity to delay, indeed obstruct, moves away from fossil fuels as the greatest political failure of the early 21st century. Given the many other global challenges—wars in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, migration crises, democratic backsliding, rising inequality and more—this might sound implausible.
A Political Failure
But, so my contention, the unparalleled risks are not properly understood. Or taken seriously.
This is puzzling since climate change is not any longer a question of science, of lacking data, unforeseeable developments, absent resources, insurmountable technical problems.
It is also not something that can be solved locally, regionally, or even nationally, and most certainly, it is not a matter of personal virtue or of individual lifestyle choices.
Instead, the climate calculus is such that any amount of technical, business, local, or personal actions do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics.
What stands in the way? To be sure, neither the democratic backsliding nor the ecological crisis are natural phenomena. They are political disasters, the consequences of a power imbalance that allows short-term benefits—of privileged individuals, countries, and industries—to trounce humanity’s long-term interests.
Climate change is a wicked problem because the costs of containing it are due immediately, payable by those who might not have caused the problem, while the benefits arrive later, including to those who have not paid anything.
Another hitch is that not even massive investment in climate mitigation will actually reverse global warming. Since carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, further warming is baked in, and decarbonization measures at best prevent temperatures from rising even more.
Thus, the overwhelming scale of the climate mitigation task is a powerful incentive for denial, free riding, and passiveness.
Still, doing nothing is the worst choice.
Fossil Fuels and Political Power
The United States emits roughly 6 billion tons of greenhouse gases a year. A study published in Nature earlier this year put the global economic damage from U.S. emissions since 1990 at $10 trillion, with a quarter of those losses inside the United States itself.
Yet the U.S. government for quite some time has undermined climate action. It withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol under George W. Bush, promoted a fracking boom under Barack Obama, withdrew from the Paris Agreement twice under Donald Trump’s two presidential terms, canceled U.S. membership in dozens of international organizations and conventions, and spared no effort to move climate policy backward.
For decades, U.S. industry has hidden evidence and blocked action. Authoritatively knowing that burning hydrocarbons warms the atmosphere has not stopped Big Oil—BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and others—from funding climate change deniers and undermining science.
Not only in the United States: Barclays, Europe’s biggest fossil fuel funder, shamelessly advises its clients on how to profit from climate disasters.
To save human civilization, decarbonizing the world’s economies and societies must be prioritized.
Since only the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will slow global warming, policies in respect of energy security, industry, infrastructure, agriculture, taxation, subsidies, environmental protection, and resilience must be grounded in carbon neutrality.
At the same time, since warming is bound to continue even under the best of circumstances, adaptation measures—such as wholesale electrification, support for public transport, and resilient agriculture, as well as cooling of cities and buildings—must be stepped up, of course.
However, it is equally clear that there is no meaningful adaptation to a 3°C world.
Too much time has been lost denying or ignoring the certainty of escalating climate costs, so that an orderly transition to a net zero situation might now be out of range.
Since even 3°C is preferable to 3.5°C or higher, it is so important not to waste the current crisis and to be clear-eyed both about the scale of the challenge and about its causes.
Big Oil companies and hydrocarbon-producing countries—almost all repressive authoritarian states—endanger a livable future. Empowering unaccountable oligarchs, they jeopardize energy sovereignty as well as political democracy.
In contrast, renewables enhance resilience, and are decentral, democratizing, and empowering.
Although this is an uphill battle, there are encouraging signs.
Courts Begin to Act
Scientists across the world produce ever more granular analyses, evidence, and arguments that extreme weather events are not always natural disasters.
Equally importantly, a growing body of proof highlights the comparative advantage of renewable energy sources, the advantages of a post-fossil world, and the various pathways to reach it.
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued its landmark, unanimously reached advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change.
Applying existing international law, the court clarified that climate harms can clearly be linked to major emitters as well as fossil-fuel producers and that these harms may constitute wrongful acts attributable to states that can be held legally accountable for their greenhouse-gas emissions.
Also in July 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that countries have a legal duty not only to avoid environmental harm but also to protect and restore ecosystems.
In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that countries must better protect their people from the consequences of climate change.
In 2021, the German Constitutional Court, in a unanimous landmark ruling, required the government to detail how it will make Germany climate neutral and when. In an unusual case of positive rights’ adjudication, it decided that the economic burden must be spread equitably from now to 2050.
In 2019, the Netherlands’ Supreme Court handed down the first major legal win for climate activists when judges ruled that protection from the potentially devastating effects of climate change was a human right and that the government has a duty to protect its citizens.
Renewables are unstoppable. Cheaper, safer, cleaner, and more reliably available than hydrocarbons.
In 2025, 90% of commissioned renewable power projects were more cost effective than any new fossil-fuel alternatives, and the 582 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy capacity added to the global energy system helped avoid fossil-fuel use valued at about $480 billion.
This year’s cost savings will be much higher. The ill-conceived illegal Iran war will see to that.
Scientists, courts, advancing technology and a myriad of civil society organizations from Vienna to Vancouver work toward the preservation of human civilization.
It is an uphill battle, but one worth fighting.
*Franz Baumann served as a United Nations official for over three decades. His last assignment in 2015 was as special adviser on environment and peace operations with the rank of assistant secretary-general. He is president emeritus of the Academic Council on the United Nations System, an adjunct professor at Webster University Vienna, and a visiting researcher at Georgetown University. From 2017 to 2021 he was a visiting research professor at New York University.
Editor’s Note: This article is published as an essay. The views and interpretations expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of IDN-InDepthNews.
The 32 endnotes underneath the original text, which document the author’s evidence—from climate-temperature data and wildfires to court judgments, fossil-fuel financing and renewable-energy costs—visit: https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2026.2725625