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1. One Planet Only Forever at 08:54 AM on 8 April, 2026

   Recent SkS posted items raise important awareness and understanding related to the historic challenge of dealing with the damage done by people who choose to fail to responsibly learn to self-regulate their actions. Thank you to Doug and Marc for curating and sharing the Weekly New Research, and to Baerbel, John, and Doug (again) for curating and sharing the Weekly News Roundups.

   A related item in this week’s Climate Policy and Politics list is, Vermont Hits Back at Trump’s Effort to Block ‘Climate Superfund’ Law. It is about responsible leaders struggling to use the powers they have, State powers in Vermont, to penalize and limit the climate change harm done by the global team of undeserving economic winners.

   Responsible leadership struggles to effectively discourage and disappoint people who want to benefit from being: less accepting of diversity, more harmful, and less helpful. Humanity, especially its leaders, has a history of struggling regionally and globally to collectively correct and recover from results of harmful pursuits of benefit and get the beneficiaries of the harm done to make equitable and adequate reparations. It is more challenging when members of a regional or global club of harmful unhelpful people Win positions of power that enable them to make-up inequitable rules and harmfully enforce rules to avoid being penalized and to threaten, penalize and punish everyone they believe is a potential threat to their undeserved perceptions of superiority.

   People passionately pursuing being perceived to be “The Winners” are most likely “The Problem”.

   Restricting a person’s freedom to continue to benefit from understandably unsustainable harmful actions - does not harm them.

   Penalizing a person for benefiting from understandably harmful actions and making their penalty help those who have been harmed - does not harm them.

    

   An earlier related item is the study The political economy of leaving fossil fuels underground: The case of producing countries, listed in Open Access Notables in Skeptical Science New Research for Week #13 2026.

   The study discusses the challenging temptation to pursue ‘Private Profits and Rents’ while creating ‘Public Problems’ by extracting and exporting non-renewable resources, especially challenging for developing nations.
   The developed economic system is fatally flawed in many ways. One of the major flaws is that it values the removal and use of non-renewable resources, and ignores the harm done (it also encourages more harm to be done because it is easier and more profitable to be more harmful). Non-renewable resources have no value when they are left in the ground.

   And the challenge is made worse by unjust made-up rules like the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty (Wikipedia link) (ECT). The EU formally withdrew from the ECT in June 2024. But the ECT rules were include ‘protection’ of Fossil Fuel investment rewards for 20 years after withdrawal (to 2044).

    

   Another recent related item is Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon, the first item listed in Open Access Notables in Skeptical Science New Research for Week #14 2026, (which was the basis of news item, Past CO2 emissions may drive far bigger future economic losses, in 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #13). The study explains that calculating the penalty owed today for fossil fuel harms of emissions-to-date should begin as early as 1980 and extend far into the future.

   The following quote is regarding the earliest date it would be reasonable to say leaders would struggle to deny understanding the harmfulness of fossil fuel use:

   To estimate when to begin counting emissions, we set our baseline ‘year of knowledge’ as 1990, or a year after the establishment of the IPCC. This is perhaps conservative: using text-based analysis of United Nations documents, other analyses set the date a decade earlier, and internal company documents reveal that some major emitters were aware of climate risks beginning around 1980.

   Any pursuer of profit from fossil fuel use since 1990, and potentially since 1980, would struggle to credibly claim that they were unaware of the harm done by fossil fuel use. This reinforces the understanding that the Energy Charter Treaty was an unjust rule made-up by undeserving wealthy people.

    

   Both studies also relate to Don Gillmore’s 2025 book, On Oil that I recently commented about (here @ comment 25 on the SkS post, After a major blow to U.S. climate regulations, what comes next?). In addition to presenting the general understanding that Alberta and other regional populations are easily tempted to pursue benefit from harmful fossil fuel use, and things really took off in about 1980, the chapter titled The Battle Begins opens with the following reinforcement of 1980 as a legitimate start date for evaluating penalties to apply to beneficiaries of harmful fossil fuel use:

   In 1980, Ronald Reagan became president of the United States and appointed James Watt, a determined anti-environmentalist, as secretary of the Department of the Interior. Watt described environmentalists as “a leftwing cult dedicated to bringing down the type of government I believe in,” and refused to meet with them. Watt was a devout Christian who believed the End Times were near. “I do not know,” he said to Congress in 1981, “how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” In the meantime there wasn’t much point in preserving the environment. Reagan concurred, telling television evangelist Jim Bakker, “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.”

   Anne Gorsuch, a lawyer who was scornful of climate science (and whose son Neil sits on the Supreme Court), was given the role of Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and cut the EPA budget by 22 percent and staff by almost 30 percent. Enforcement declined by 79 percent during her first year. She hired people from the industries the EPA was supposed to be regulating, tried to weaken pollution standards, and facilitated the use of restricted-use pesticides. She resigned in 1983 amid scandal, ... Her most lasting legacy may have been to solidify political battle lines around oil and the environment: If you were a Republican, you were pro-development and, if not anti-environment, at least anti-environmentalist. It began as a corporate issue, then became a political issue and to some extent a generational issue, and finally, like so much these days, it became a tribal issue.

   The formation of the ECT in 1994, 14 years after 1980, should be understood to be a misleading attempt to unjustifiably obtain benefit and protect against the loss of undeserved perceptions of superiority. And since 1980 it has continually become clearer that investments in new fossil fuel pursuits should be considered to be bets in the marketplace that deserve whatever ‘penalties or losses of opportunity for benefit’ happen. The people who benefited from the delay of transition away from fossil fuel use since 1980, particularly business leaders and investors, could and should be penalized rather than be protected and rewarded. ‘Legal creations’ like the ECT should not be able to be used to evade penalty for past ‘bad bets made on benefiting from fossil fuel use’.

   There is a long diverse history of harmful pursers of personal benefit seriously damaging and delaying the development of sustainable improvements for the future of humanity. The, now officially discredited, Doctrine of Discovery developed as Papal Bulls in the 1400s (Link to Canadian Museum for Human Rights) and was formally brought into American Law by US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in 1823 (Link to Wikipedia). It was misleading marketing to excuse undeniably harmful colonialism, racism, and slavery. The incorrect beliefs about the ‘fundamental superiority of a sub-set of humanity’ persist in the supposedly most advanced societies today, and contaminate the thoughts and actions in many developing societies, allowing neocolonialism (link to Wikipedia) to flourish.

   People passionately pursuing being perceived to be “The Winners” are most likely “The Problem”.

    

   I have also been re-reading Thomas Piketty’s 2021 book, A Brief History of Equality (first english translation 2022). The following are selected related quotes:

   From Chapter 9, Exiting Neocolonialism, which includes a sub-section with the heading, The Pretenses of International Aid and Climate Policies.

   The battle for equality is not over. It must be continued by pushing to its logical conclusion the movement toward the welfare state, progressive taxation, real equality, and the struggle against all kinds of discrimination. The battle also, and especially, involves a structural transformation of the global economic system [including reparations (penalties) for harms done by past emissions, and no compensation for people claiming to be harmed by restrictions of their harmfulness and penalties for being harmful] .
   …
   Our current economic organization, which is founded on the uncontrolled circulation of capital lacking either a social or environmental objective, often resembles a form of neocolonialism that benefits the wealthiest persons. This model of development is politically and ecologically untenable. Moving beyond it requires the transformation of the national welfare state into a federal [multi-national] welfare state open to the global South, along with a profound revision of the rules and treaties that currently govern globalization.
   ...
   We must also emphasize the extreme hypocrisy that surrounds the very notion of international aid. First, public aid for development is much more limited than is often imagined: in all, it represents less than 0.2 percent of the global GDP (and scarcely 0.03 percent of the global GDP for emergency humanitarian aid). In comparison, the cost of climatic damage inflicted on poor countries by past and current emissions from rich countries amounts by itself to several points of the global GDP. The second problem, which is not a detail [not a minor technicality], is that in most of the countries supposedly “aided” in Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere, the amount of outflow in the form of multinationals’ profits and capital flights [evading taxation] is in reality several times greater than the incoming flows from public assistance, …

   Chapter 10 sub-section with the heading, Climate Change and the Battle Between Ideologies.

   All the transformations [sustainable improvements reducing harmful inequality] discussed in this book, whether the development of the welfare state, progressive taxation, participatory socialism, electoral and educational equality, or the exit from neocolonialism, will occur only if they are accompanied by strong mobilizations and power relationships. There is nothing surprising about that: in the past, it has always been struggles and collective movements that have made it possible to replace old [harmful unsustainable] structures with new institutions.
   …
   Environmental catastrophes are, of course, among the factors that may help accelerate the pace of change. In theory, we could hope that the mere prospect of these catastrophes, whose future occurrence scientific research has increasingly confirmed, might suffice to provoke adequate mobilization. Unfortunately, it is possible that only tangible concrete damage greater than we have already seen will manage to break down conservative attitudes and radically challenge the current economic system.
   …
   In the darkest scenario, the signals will come too late to avoid conflicts between nations over resources, and it will take decades to realize possible, as yet hypothetical reconstructions [sustainable developments like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pursuits to mitigate and correct high levels of inequality] [we are potentially already experiencing that Darkest Scenario].
   …
   We can also foresee hostile reactions towards countries and social groups whose ways of life have contributed most to the disaster, starting with the richest classes in the United States, but also in Europe and the rest of the world.
   …
   the global North, despite a limited population (about 15% of world population for the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, and Japan), has produced nearly 80% of the carbon emissions that have accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
   …
   However, we have to qualify the idea that a green Enlightenment will be likely to save the planet. In reality, people have suspected for a long time – indeed almost since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – that this accelerated burning of fossil fuels might have harmful effects. If reactions have been slow and remain so limited even today, that is also and especially because the economic interests at stake are considerable, between countries as well as within them. For the countries most affected (in particular in the global South), the attenuation of the effects of a warming climate and financing for measures to adapt to it will require a transformation of the distribution of wealth and the economic system as a whole, and this in turn will involve the development of new political and social coalitions on a global scale. The idea that there might be only winners is a dangerous and anesthetizing illusion that must be abandoned immediately.

   It all closes back to the SkS items that this comment started with.

   People passionately pursuing being perceived to be “The Winners” are most likely “The Problem”.

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