Economic globalization was once a topic of much interest and political debate. Now its existence appears as a foregone conclusion. The global economy is a complete entity comprised of a web of corporate and market institutions that wrap around the planet like an electronic sheet. When this entity roils and shudders or starts to burn, the effects are felt everywhere simultaneously as profound crises, the most pernicious of which are the acute waves of recurring financial system instabilities and the steadily intensifying slow cook of global warming. Both are undoubtedly the most extreme dangers we face as we tread our way through the twenty-first century, and both are indifferent to national boundaries.

For those who look closely, it is not difficult to see how we are allowing these dangers to continue. The conditions for another dramatic banking and financial meltdown remain intact. Carbon is spewing into the atmosphere at high volume as people everywhere burn cheap fossil fuels faster than ever. Yet we seem very reluctant to change what we are doing even though the consequences of economic and climate instability are clear to see. Government efforts aimed at stabilizing the financial system and attenuating climate change remain elusive and symbolic. Populations stay largely complacent, like so many of the mythological boiling frogs, as long as they are not being personally and acutely traumatized. Nothing really changes except that our economic and environmental conditions are becoming more unstable.

But to change course is hard. As a case in point, look at the story of global warming and our perennial inability to address it. Some time ago, a group of scientists prepared a report for the President of the United States titled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.” The panel explained that as we humans have been powering our economies with fossil fuels, we are releasing massive amounts of carbon that has been locked in sediment for over five hundred million years into the atmosphere. “In a few short centuries,” the report says, “we are returning to the air a significant part of the carbon that was slowly extracted by plants and buried in the sediment during half a billion years.” The report goes on to say that the consequence would be significant changes in climate and those changes could be, “deleterious from the point of view of human life on the planet.