Prologue
Human activities such as deforestation, forest fires, mining, industrialized agriculture, the burning of fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas, coal), and wars have been threatening nature, civilization, and humans. Those threats weaponize the planet’s temperature. Scientists describe that effect as climate change/climate chaos.
By Evaggelos G. Vallianatos
Climate change/chaos is global and anthropogenic/artificial. It has been affecting the lives of billions of people and the planet’s survival. Pope Francis was angry with the failing international political system, which is at the expense of humanity and Mother Earth. In his October 4, 2023, encyclical, Laudate Deum / Praise God, he said: “I have realized that our responses [to climate crisis] have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”
This realization highlights the immense humanitarian dimensions of climate chaos. They are gigantic. All people in the world are potential victims and humanitarians, both separately and simultaneously. In both difficult times and times of peace, humans are humanitarians, that is, instinctively feel solidarity with suffering fellow humans. Sympathy, solidarity, cooperation, and mutual assistance increase in times of common and national threats and dangers.
The burning of fossil fuels in the US is responsible for about 74 percent of the country’s warming. The burning of petroleum, for instance, releases gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). These gases grab chunks of solar energy, which they eventually release. This additional energy/heat slowly increases global temperature. It becomes a warm coat around the planet.
Human intervention in the natural world has increased considerably since the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. The 20th century spread the industrialization model to most countries. WWI, 1914-1918, and WWII, 1939-1945, added vast amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Then, the Cold War/militarization of international relations, 1945-1989, increased global climate pollution. And since the 1970s, one of the largest and most populous countries in the world, China, has entered the age of industrialization, mechanizing its economy, industry, agriculture, and armed forces, considerably boosting the planet’s greenhouse burden. In the 21st century, China is “the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, produc[ing] 12.7 billion metric tons of emissions annually. That dwarfs U.S. emissions, currently [in 2024] about 5.9 billion tons annually.” In general, China is the largest climate polluter, and the US is the second-largest.
This means global temperatures keep increasing, with foreseeable and unforeseeable adverse effects: storms, forest fires, city fires, hurricanes, bomb rains, flooding, heatwaves on land and at sea, drought, the potential melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, and the thawing of permafrost in Alaska and Siberia. These real and potential disasters significantly magnify the need for humanitarian assistance.
Climate chaos
Every human-caused natural phenomenon is a symptom of planetary warming. They have been causing upheavals in the natural world and human societies. Forest fires, for example, are catastrophic for countless animal and plant species living in the forest. Such ecosystem damage disrupts fresh drinking water supplies and affects the survival of endangered species, leading to their extinction. Burnt trees also release the carbon dioxide they had absorbed from the atmosphere, thereby increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and, in turn, the planet’s temperature.
Forest fires sometimes spill over into nearby cities, with dramatic and often catastrophic effects. In January 2025, fires burned towns in southern California, such as Altadena, and neighborhoods in the Los Angeles megalopolis. The temptation to rebuild is enormous. However, burnt towns become toxic, with heavy metal contamination threatening human health.
The melting of Arctic sea ice is threatening the survival of polar bears, for example. And the continued melting of ice in Antarctica and Greenland threatens islands like Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean. This is a humanitarian and philosophical issue of the highest order. Do humans have the right to continue with activities (the burning of fossil fuels) that endanger the survival of other humans, in this case, the survival of nations and countries like Tuvalu? I don’t think so. Continuing with the fossil fuels becomes an undeclared war, in which case we need to ask, why kill the people of Tuvalu? Isn’t such killing genocidal? What did they do to become our enemies? And also, Tuvaluans have had a minor impact on the world’s temperature compared to people in industrialized countries like the US. As humans living in North America and Europe, China, Russia, and the Middle East, don’t we have the moral and political responsibility to protect them from our own actions? Humanitarianism becomes or should become the highest virtue.
Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Wars over oil continue. Their effects are global and, in combination with climate change, which they fuel, are threatening to increase the screaming dead to billions.
Kausea Natano, the former Prime Minister of Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific island nation, is one of those screaming. He must have had similar thoughts about oil and wars. He proposed a treaty to stop the expansion of fossil fuels, which he treated like weapons of mass destruction:
“The longer we remain addicted to fossil fuels,” Natano said to world leaders at the Santa Marta, Colombia, Conference in April 2026, “the longer we commit ourselves to mutual decline…. A negotiated Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty would complement the Paris Agreement and ensure a global just transition. We’ve proven we can mobilize our collective ambition at the multilateral level. The scale of the challenge we face can now only be met with an even greater level of ambition and cooperation. I traveled thousands of miles over four days to be here today, because I believe in international cooperation and multilateralism. I have faith in our collective humanity and our ability to foster global solidarity to undertake what needs to be done.”
Kausea Natano’s treaty proposal began at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, November 2022. He announced he had the support of “a hundred Nobel laureates and thousands of scientists worldwide to urge world leaders to join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to manage a just transition away from fossil fuels. The time has come to make peace with the planet…. if we can save our islands, we can save the world.”
Four years later, at the Santa Marta, Colombia, conference in April 2026, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, expressed similar views: they favored the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to phase out fossil fuels.
António Guterres said that “The scale of the challenge dwarfs climate action. The future is not fixed. It is for leaders like you to write it…. The move from fossil fuels to renewables is happening – but we are decades behind.” Then Gustavo Petro explained why we need to abandon fossil fuels. He said: “The real goal that all countries should have is aiming for zero production and supply of carbon gas and oil. If we don’t make that our overarching goal, lives will not be saved. If we keep on our current track, it will be suicide…. Fossil fuel subsidies need to be completely eliminated worldwide.”
Finally, Gavin Newsom spoke. He said: “This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis. It’s not complicated. It’s the burning of oil. It’s the burning of gas. It’s the burning of coal. And we need to call that out. For decades and decades, the fossil fuel industry has been playing every one of us in this room for fools.”
Exactly. Natano, Guterres, Petro, and Newsom expressed the virtues of knowledge, wisdom, and humanitarianism at work. The Greeks would say Freedom or Death. The courage and vision of these world leaders are paradigmatic and necessary to stop the fossil fuel looters of the planet. And Prime Minister Natano’s proposal to stop the ceaseless rise in global temperature with a Fossil Fuels Non-Proliferation Treaty is original, timely and humanitarian. It also captured the imagination of a few important world leaders.
Al Gore
In his own quiet way, former Vice President Al Gore shared Natano’s vision. He is well aware of the planetary grip of the carbon heating gases. His Climate TRACE Coalition can reveal the hitherto secret emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. On November 9, 2022, the UN’s Guterres honored Gore at Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt. He said:
“Climate TRACE and its data show that because of underreporting of methane leaks, flaring, and other activities associated with oil and gas production, emissions are many times higher than previously reported. This should be a wake-up call for Governments and the financial sector, especially those that continue to invest in and underwrite fossil fuel pollution. The problem is even greater than we were led to believe, and that means we must work even harder to accelerate the phase out of all fossil fuels.”
The potential revelations from Gore’s climate initiative will probably confirm Guterres’ fear that the danger of the unleashed climate Medusa is much greater than we have speculated from incomplete, nay, misleading data.
It turns out satellites track down more than 72,000 carbon polluters on the planet. One of the largest is a steel plant in Zhangjiagang, China, belonging to the Shagang Group. This steel plant has been churning out millions of tons of steel per year. Climate Trace estimated that this plant is the most carbon-polluting factory on the planet. Climate Trace boasts it can monitor carbon pollution from entire countries, industries, individual factories, cargo ships, animal farms, steel, cement, and fertilizer factories, as well as gas and oil extraction facilities. Overall, Trace Climate is giving us a compendium of more than 72,612 polluters. “A hyperlocal atlas of the human activities that are altering the planet’s chemistry.”
Antonio Guterres is right, enough with treating civilization and Mother Earth like a toilet. The fossil fuel companies are pushing us to a hellish future. We must ban them – before 2030. We certainly don’t want a global temperature of 2.7 degrees Celsius. Take science seriously. Act now to defend the Earth and civilization. Take seriously Kausea Natano’s proposal to phase out fossil fuels with a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
America is warming faster than other countries
In the US, however, climate policy science is on-and-off, depending on the administration. President Joe Biden was not a model of putting human and environmental health above fossil fuels. But he was responsible enough to admit the country was suffering from the burning of fossil fuels. He encouraged the experts working in the federal government to study global warming. They did. On November 14, 2023, they published The Fifth National Climate Assessment. This comprehensive study painted a real, though dangerous, picture of America awash in fossil fuels and rising temperatures, especially over the last 50 years.
We should have known that war has always been an explosive charge to climate chaos. It accelerates planetary warming by boosting the production and burning of fossil fuels. Some US politicians probably understand this lethal connection between war and higher global temperatures. But many politicians, especially Republicans, ignore climate change altogether, exactly like President Trump. They take advantage of the wars in Ukraine, the October 7, 2023, war in Israel, and the war between the US and Israel against Iran, which started in February 2026. These wars increase the military budget and the immense profits of the munitions companies that fund their reelection.
Add to the military-generated warming of America, the vast industrialized agriculture of the country, its thousands of unregulated animal farms, factories of greenhouse gases, disease and annual slaughter of about 10 billion animals, the equally vast numbers of petroleum-powered cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, yachts, and the fossil fuel-powered production of electricity, cement, fertilizers, and pesticides, you get an idea of the colossal fossil fuel energy used daily in America. To add insult to injury, cities light up their skyscrapers, hotels, and theaters at night. This light pollution is an additional, thoroughly unnecessary blow to the planet.
We know that the land warms faster than the ocean, that higher latitudes have been warming faster than lower latitudes and that “the Arctic has warmed fastest of all.” In addition, some eight disasters, each causing on average about a billion dollars in damage, have struck the US every year in the past forty years. However, climate change has been multiplying these calamities to 18 per year over the past five years. As I said, the Biden White House published the Fifth National Climate Assessment (November 14, 2023). The Report said that the more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the worse it is for us now and for our children. And we experience the worst effects by far (in thousands of years).
“The global warming observed over the industrial era,” says the Report, “is unequivocally caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities—primarily burning fossil fuels. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the primary greenhouse gas produced by human activities—and other greenhouse gases continue to rise due to ongoing global emissions. Stopping global warming would require both reducing CO2 emissions to net zero and rapid, deep reductions in other greenhouse gases. Net-zero CO2 emissions means that CO2 emissions decline to zero.”
But the most startling and devastating conclusion of the Fifth Climate Report is that the US is beyond the charts. Its obsession with the profits of petroleum companies, and petroleum-powered machines (cars, trucks, buses, ships, yachts, airplanes, industrialized agriculture and, especially, animal farms, leaf blowers, military fleets of airplanes and navies) has made the country extremely vulnerable to private greed, and to the forces of nature. Ceaseless dumping of unfathomable amounts of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere is threatening the country with thermal death.
“The things Americans value most are at risk,” says the Fifth National Climate Assessment. “More intense extreme events and long-term climate changes make it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families, reliable public services, a sustainable economy, thriving ecosystems and strong communities… The United States has warmed 68 percent faster than Earth as a whole over the past 50 years.”
Epilogue
Humanitarianism, compassion for the plight or misfortunes striking Americans from climate chaos, may well be the greatest political and ethical virtue and power to slow down and stop our suicidal burning of fossil fuels. Humanity’s connection to oil, gas, and coal has become addictive and very difficult to oppose with scientific evidence. An example of this is President Trump and the Republican politicians in Congress and their followers all over the country.
The evidence of the destructive effects of climate chaos is everywhere. The country is warming faster than any other place on Earth. America and the world have been suffering almost daily, weekly and monthly. But those hooked on the profits of oil and gas are governing America and the planet, or are agents of the fossil fuel industry. Not merely America but the entire planet is warming faster than the last ice age: “The rate of warming from the end of the last ice age was about 7 degrees Celsius over a period of 18,000 years, or 0.04 degrees Celsius per century. In contrast, the rate of warming over the past 100 years was roughly 1.3 degrees Celsius per century. That’s about 32 times faster than the rate coming out of the Last Glacial Maximum.”
Facts, however, don’t seem to matter. Oil and gas supporters ignore evidence and support what’s profitable to them. Like religious beliefs, superstition rejecting the climate chaos-fossil fuels connection has become metaphysics, blocking reason and science.
The alternative to this catastrophic ideology and policy is to bring humanitarians together to change the prevailing oil politics into one that celebrates life/civilization/Sun/wind, and human solidarity. I would add to this mixture the ideas, passion, and leadership of Al Gore, Gavin Newsom, Gustavo Petro, Antonio Guterres, and Kausea Natano. These leaders initiated the first international conference to phase out oil, gas, and coal through the April 2026 Santa Marta Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Santa Marta, Colombia, conference reached this conclusion:
“A Fossil Fuel Treaty is the most comprehensive articulation of an actionable, time-bound, and legally binding global plan for a just transition away from fossil fuels, with equity and justice at the center. Accelerating a global just transition is the most urgent act of courage of our time. It is the foundation for a livable, healthy, fair, and peaceful future that humanity and our planet desperately need.”
Humanitarians in America and other countries need to join hands and embrace the Fossil Fuel Treaty and those leaders who made it possible. The context is a global coalition open to nation states, “subnational governments, Indigenous peoples, scientists and civil society.
The continued burning of fossil fuels is not an abstract threat but a gathering catastrophe already disfiguring human life across generations. Heatwaves now suffocate cities, turning homes into ovens for the elderly and the poor, while children grow up breathing thick air with toxins that scar their lungs and shorten their futures. Storms no longer arrive as seasonal disturbances but as violent, recurring assaults—flattening communities, drowning coastlines, and leaving behind toxic wastelands where rebuilding becomes both perilous and unjust. Forests that once sustained life erupt into infernos, releasing not only carbon but entire ecosystems into oblivion, destabilizing water supplies and food systems on which millions depend.
If urgent and decisive steps are not taken to eliminate fossil fuel use, the future will not merely be warmer—it will be harsher, more unequal, and profoundly destabilized. Rising seas will erase nations and create millions of climate refugees, while prolonged droughts and crop failures ignite conflicts over dwindling resources. Diseases will spread into new regions, and entire populations will be trapped in cycles of displacement and despair. What is at stake is not only environmental balance but the survival of humane society itself; a failure to act now condemns future generations to inherit a planet where suffering is normalized and hope is rationed.
The virtue of humanitarianism lies in sharing the same vision of the future. Humanitarianism is powerful because it is inclusive and just. It brings out the best in human beings: mutual assistance, compassion, and solidarity for a better society and, definitely, a better world to live in.
Evaggelos G. Vallianatos, Ph.D., is a historian, eco-political theorist, and strategist. He studied zoology and Greek history at the University of Illinois, earned his Ph.D. in European and Greek history at the University of Wisconsin, did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard, worked on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency, taught at several universities and authored hundreds of articles and several books, including Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026).
