Global Environmental and Energy Issues

Natural and Societal Aspects

There are several natural issues in the field of environment and energy. The largest is global warming. The increase in the average temperature of the Earth's global surface was 0.74 ± 0.18°C during the 20th century (IPCC, 2007). Since 1880, the 10 years with highest global surface temperature occurred between 1995 and 2010. The concentration of equivalent carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere in the last century grew from 180 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm.

There are five societal sectors whose relative influence is in fact extremely disproportionate. Foremost are private business leaders. This sector is strongly organized in the Northern Hemisphere and has the real and legal power to accumulate capital returns even if doing so destroys the environmental ecosystems that ensure the health and well-being of humankind. Another is public regulatory organizations. As is generally admitted, law is the most powerful instrument to build a state of human solidarity as the basic foundation of civilization. In classic political theory (e.g., Montesquieu's 1748 work, The Spirit of the Laws), the basic independent and interconnected public regulatory organizations, endowed with full constraining power, are the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. Today these highest, unquestionable powers exist only at the national level. This is an immeasurable failure, and one of the most important challenges of the contemporary world. The United Nations is the most important example. It is endowed with some capacity of sanctioning but without any kind of legal constraining power (Sciora & Stevenson, 2009). Status quo defenders, comprising a large portion of middle-class persons and organizations mainly situated in the Northern Hemisphere, accept the current situation, preferring to save their privileges as consumers and wage earners. Intellectual and moral organizations comprise a manifold variety of citizens who struggle to inform the general public on the necessity of balancing environmental and socioeconomic issues. The intellectual and moral organizations are real, quite diverse, and well-managed philanthropic organizations that exert significant and efficient pressure to confront various kinds of societal world problems. Today they are expanded everywhere. Finally, civil society citizenry consists of the general population that is ordinarily not mobilized for political or social action except on unusual occasions.

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