If you believe in business-first, then you must believe insurance actuaries who set the insurance cost for that system. Actuaries they know the odds.

The Institute of Faculty of Actuaries at the University Exeter in the UK, in a January 2025 report estimated that if human beings don’t take immediate and definitive steps to counteract and reverse harms we currently do to Nature, by 2050 and when Earth hits 3°C above pre-industrial baseline temperature, 4 BILLION human beings on earth will die from “[F}requent large scale mortality events” with “significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide and/ or state failure with rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital, and systems identity”, including equal reductions in global business, financial impacts, and GDP losses. Even if humanity is able to keep the average temperature increase to 2°C – which has already been sporadically hit in many places around the planet although not yet a global average – only 2 billion people will perish, a 25% reduction.

Please remember, these “extremes” are just Nature trying to rebalance her ecological systems in order to recover from the ignorant and self-centered abuses of an ego-led humanity. Humanity’s ultimate hubris is leading to suicide.

Immediate steps must be taken to reverse our ways. Even though fossil fuel companies want YOU to shoulder the burden by reducing YOUR ecological footprint and impact to “save” the day – and you will soon reduce your ecological footprint regardless of whether you do it voluntarily or through rationing – the main human structures causing the largest climate-related impacts are militaries (especially the U.S. military), fossil fuels use, extractive industries, large-scale construction with concrete and steel manufacturing and use, and the richest 10% of humanity which already puts more carbon into the environment than the lower 50% of the population combined. To get these entities to change their ways requires a paradigm shift in consciousness in about how humanity is to live sustainably on Earth: these power brokers will not want to go quietly, nor care for the death of others besides their tribe’s.

Humans must learn to live much more locally, with sustainable circular economies, and less from the global, just-in-time and extractively consumptive paradigm we currently operate under. It’s “correct or break” time: we’re bending things as far as they will go without cascading into uncontrollable freefall. Nature is saying it’s up to us if humanity is to survive and thrive.

Bob Bates Tulllahoma