Banner Image: waratah, fragment, Tasmania's native Christmas flower. Photo Charles Chadwick, with permission
President Trump, sea level rise, technology (doubts) and remembrance April 8, 2025 (this is the long version; the summary is for BODHI Times 61, to be published this month).
In 2017 the 50th issue of this newsletter published an essay called "A sorcerer out of control? Inequality, Trump, Brexit and reasons to avoid despair". A version is available below. In it, I likened US President Donald Trump to a dark force, conjured by a sorcerer "no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (quoting Karl Marx). I argued that the excesses of unrestrained capitalism (often called “neoliberalism”) had created such unfairness in the U.S. (especially via the hollowing of the industrial cities, once fairly prosperous until "globalisation") that it led to Trump's election. Eight years later, we now know that Trump's first term as president did little to bring prosperity to America's working class. That ongoing malaise (and seething resentment) helped to fuel Trump's re-election. Trump's "liberation" day has intensified a global trade war that could deliver a new Depression.
In 2017 I still hoped that social institutions and civil society, in the U.S. and elsewhere, could lead to a more prosperous and fairer future for all, despite President Trump’s election. Today I don't feel as optimistic. Trump has recently cut USAID funding to almost nothing. Although U.S. spending on aid was previously very low in relation to the size of its economy it was still very important – because the U.S. economy is so large. The argument that the effectiveness of this aid was reduced by the neoliberally-stimulated (“cornucopian”) taboo on the importance of family planning to development is more subtle, but something I have long argued. See https://overpopulation-project.com/high-fertility-in-low-income-settings-the-cruelty-of-unfettered-capitalism/ for a recent essay by me on this.
Sea level rise
Trump is proudly promoting a "drill baby drill" strategy that effectively dismisses people who care about climate change as idiots. This is even though the rate of average global sea level rise in 2024 set a new record, 40% more than expected (5.9 mm compared to 4.3 mm). See: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/jason-cs-sentinel-6/sentinel-6-michael-freilich/nasa-analysis-shows-unexpected-amount-of-sea-level-rise-in-2024/ 5.9 mm is almost double the average annual rise in sea level (3 mm) when I started to pay attention to this topic (in the 1990s). A rising rate of sea level rise is impossible to explain away as fake news, even though the issue is complicated by factors such as oceans “sloshing” in their basins, by land subsidence, including from the extraction of ground water, and land “rebound” such as when glaciers melt. However, the NASA data refer to the global average rise, and use satellite-based measurements to reach their conclusion.
Today’s world seems like a period late in the western Roman empire. Invaders and threats exist in multiple places; and even if one competent emperor was to emerge the forces of chaos may be too much. I used to admire Elon Musk, but (for example) he recently called a European astronaut "fully retarded" - because this astronaut had accused Musk of lying when Musk claimed in a Fox News interview alongside Donald Trump that two NASA astronauts were stranded for “political reasons” by former president Joe Biden (e.g. see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/21/elon-musk-butch-wilmore-suni-williams-nasa-astronaut-iss-claims-biden).
The technology Space X has developed, e.g. reuseable rocket boosters, is incredible. However, the problems of inequality and war are much worse. Technological progress must be accompanied by social progress; it is not. Technological progress is severely out of balance. While the technology can and is used for good it should by now be obvious that its use for social harm is far more likely (e.g. AI weapons and robots).
When I wrote this column for the first issue of this newsletter (1991) the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, was still ahead (discussed, by the way, in BODHI Times number 3 - that can be read at https://www.bodhi-australia.com/bodhi-times-newsletter-archive.html) there still seemed time to save civilisation from its worst impulses. Now, I think, it is a matter of time before the new Dark Age. I desperately wish I was wrong. However, from the point of view of karma, it does seem to me that the incredible selfishness and complacency western society has largely shown in recent decades is likely to cause an adverse reaction, possibly on a semi-global scale. While many people who attended the Earth Summit were sincere, it is also apparent that many of the promises that the politicians made there lacked the support that was really needed. (Similarly for the Millennium and then the Sustainable Development Goals). These are arguments I've repeatedly tried to make, with very little attention. (Indeed, for anyone still reading, I remind you my PhD (2002) was called "Inequality and Sustainability". It's available at https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/514a9740-e354-42a4-8828-c681cd2b722b. There is also a paper I published in 2000, of relevance, called: "Inequality, global change and the sustainability of civilisation" (Global Change and Human Health, 1, 156-172). It can be downladed for free from https://colindbutler.weebly.com/2000s.html).
My fear that we are being misled about the price of renewable energy
The new energy technologies, such as wind, solar and batteries, are not yet quite cheap enough to rescue the world from climate change. Perhaps nowhere sufficiently cheap, at a global level. For example, if solar and wind really are less costly sources of electrical energy than coal why is the Chinese government still building so many coal-fired power stations?
My gut feeling is that when all factors are considered, including transmission, storage and decommission costs, solar and wind are not yet cheap enough to drive out coal, at least in China. I worry the enthusiasts for renewables have some major blind spots. Perhaps I can write on that for the Journal of the Academy of Public Health – which recently published my letter “Trust in science, The Lancet, and Covid-19's origin” in response to “The Rise and Fall of Scientific Journals and a Way Forward” by Martin Kulldorff. (See: https://publichealth.realclearjournals.org/perspectives/2025/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-scientific-journals-and-a-way-forward/)
I have also read how (at least in New Zealand) electric car chargers have a variety of plugs that are incompatible. The market has been loosened - competition encouraged rather than co-operation and rational planning; a bit like railway companies with different gauges. This can be fixed (as rail gauges were eventually) but it's obvious that climate change is going to get a lot worse. (More positively, a Chinese electric car company is reported as developing a much faster battery charger.)
Indian prosperity? And a rant about Bill Gates
A recent report in the Economist claims that poverty in India has dropped to “negligible” levels (https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/27/india-has-undermined-a-popular-myth-about-development). If true, this is good news. But it is inconsistent with the impression I have, not only from my own visits (none since 2018) and also from the Indians I know. If the survey this story is based on is correct it means that only 1% of India's households receive less than $2.15 a day, adjusted for purchasing-power parity (PPP). However, the report acknowledges that this level of income is not enough to be free of substantial deprivation. $2.15 (PPP) is still less than US$10 a day in a rich country (my PhD was in part about PPP conversions - the data and assumptions are very problematic). I doubt anyone reading this would think US$10 a day means the end of poverty.
A new book by Ashoka Mody called "India Is Broken. A People Betrayed, Independence to Today" is sympathetic to my view (see https://www.sup.org/books/history/india-broken). The blurb for this book notes: "today, a vast majority of Indians live in a state of underemployment and are one crisis away from despair. Public goods—health, education, cities, air and water, and the judiciary—are in woeful condition. And good jobs will remain scarce as long as that is the case." These problems would be greatly helped by improving the determinants of slower population growth: more fairness, better education and a higher status for women. Issues that generated the founding of BODHI in 1989.
Gates, compared to me, is like the planet Jupiter bugged by a tiny mosquito. After I published a peer reviewed paper criticising his foundation in 2019 (open access https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/10/1/24) for its lack of understanding of planetary health I repeatedly tried to correspond with someone at the Gates foundation. Despite their vast resources they never showed any hint of reading it. I think that, more than any other thing, was the most alienating aspect. Rather than engage with critics, they ignore them. A couple of years ago I was asked to write a chapter about the Gates Foundation for a book on philanthrocapitalism. I wrote it, focussing mainly on Gates' incomprehension of social medicine. Unfortunately, the reviewer and the book's editors (none of whom seemed to have previously heard of social medicine) didn't like what I wrote. It remains unpublished.
Gates is, I find, nauseatingly arrogant. As Trump now is, he is surrounded by sycophants. Perhaps Gates is sincere. That does not mean he is correct. The money he has spent on global health has done good. But has it been that well spent overall? I doubt it. One of the most articulate critics of Gates is Tim Schwab, e.g. his book "The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire" (https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-bill-gates-problem-9780241609484).
Remembrance
My two main scientific mentors were Professor Tony McMichael and Dr Maurice King. Tony’s most influential book was called “Planetary Overload”. It was published in 1993. Maurice, who died in late 2024, wrote and edited many things, including “Medical Care in Developing Countries. A Primer on the Medicine of Poverty and a Symposium from Makerere” (published 1966) and “Health is a Sustainable State” (1990). Maurice, who I first met in 1990, was also BODHI’s public health advisor, from 1991.
Tony was profoundly influenced by the ecological movement in the 1970s, including The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. Although this book (by Meadows et al) – and the movement it was part of - was initially taken seriously, both by scientists, the general public and even the U.S. government (especially by President Jimmy Carter) it was then suppressed, except among the environmental movement.
In my opinion almost all of the worst manifestations of modern society have roots associated with these nearing limits.
The first of the three general conclusions of The Limits to Growth was:
“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity." (see Hancock, T. 2015. Managing decline: global change requires local action. In: Butler, C.D., Dixon, J. & Capon, T. (eds.) Health of People, Places and Planet. Canberra: ANU Press. pp. 536-545, open access at: https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p320071/pdf/ch30.pdf)
This conclusion is pretty similar to the 2025 actuarial report that I refer to above, except that the world no longer has 100 years to fix these problems. It is also similar to a series of reports that by the Worldwatch Institute that I started to read in the 1980s. Inflation is, in part, due to the comparatively high cost of energy (whether from fossil fuels or “renewable” sources) while rising insurance costs are associated with climate change worsened extreme weather events and too many people living in areas at risk from flooding, tornadoes and sea level rise. Inflation, in turn, has been a big factor in declining living standards, and in the growing popularity of right wing governments. Their popularity has also been helped by migration, both legal and illegal, from countries of the global South (such as Niger, Venezuela and Myanmar).
Conclusion
This is all very depressing. If you have read this far, thank you. I draw no satisfaction at all from watching these events unfold .. though I do have some hope that the taboo on considering that the COVID-19 pandemic might have evolved from the mistakes of over-confident virologists is starting to lift; consider for example this free essay in the New York Times called “We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives”. See https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html
Thank you for your support. I know that times are hard; they are likely to become even harder. Even so it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. On the bright side I have been invited to teach, in person, for a semester at Tzu Chi University (TCU), in Hualien, Taiwan, in 2026. I will be using a curriculum based on the second edition of the book Climate Change and Global Health, that I co-edited with Dr Kerryn Higgs, and which was published in 2024. My thanks to Associate Prof. Elise de Vido and to TCU President Ingrid Liu for facilitating this.
A sorcerer out of control? Inequality, President Trump, Brexit and reasons for hope (number 50, 2017)
In 1848, Karl Marx published the first issue of a slim (23 pages) pamphlet, called The Communist Manifesto. Within it is the famous phrase “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
This sentence, written so long ago, mesmerises me. It suggests that the forces of capitalism, beyond a threshold, are like a demon, and that capitalism itself (and the society that depends on it) can become victim of the spells which the excesses of capitalism have released. I am not a Marxist, nor a communist, but I do believe in a much fairer global society than we now have, with only eight super-billionaires now controlling as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion. It was partly my attraction for greater fairness that made me study medicine, focussing especially on the health problems of low-income settings – including in 1985 when I spent 10 months away from Australia, as a senior medical student, mainly learning about health problems in Africa and South Asia.
It did not take long for me to decide that purely biomedical approaches (e.g. better drugs or more doctors) could have little impact on the health issues of what was then called “The Third World”. This realisation propelled me to a career in public health, but in 1997 an experience I had at the Ronald Ross Centenary conference convinced me that fundamental changes in economic and political power are needed even more than vaccines and interventions such as handwashing and more toilets. I realised that while many in public health work for good health, far fewer work for the economic and social reforms which underpin health (given that the heyday of “Health for All”, was already well past.) Though not trained as an economist I determined that I would still do the best I could; later, during my doctorate, I was able to study the work of many economists.
The foundation of social medicine
Friedrich Engels, the great colleague and sponsor of Karl Marx, had similar views. His book The Conditions of the Working Class in England, which documents the harrowing living conditions of the poor in the growing industrialising city of Manchester, during a time of scarcely regulated capitalism in the 1840s, is still recommended to public health students.
Also in the 1840s, the great German physician, Rudolf Virchow was instrumental in the formation of social medicine. In 1848 he helped establish a weekly publication called dieMedizinische Reform (Medical Reform). This publication is reported to have had headlines such as “medicine is a social science” and “the physician is the natural lawyer of the poor”. Social science, at that time very young, was then as now, focussed on efforts to reduce inequality.
The Gilded Ages
It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the end of the 1840s (also called the “hungry40s”) was a time of social upheaval in Europe – laissez faire capitalism had raised economic growth, but also deepened inequality, and with it, the risk of revolution. Much later, Hirschman, in 1982, argued that excessively unrestrained market forces (such as in the 1840s, the gilded age of the late 19th century, the 1920s and since about 1980) can undermine the moral values that are its own essential underpinnings, generating the satire “greed is good" in the film Wall St. Hirschman's arguments support the idea that there are great cycles in the world economy; not just booms and busts, but periods of self-restraint by elites, followed by a gradual forgetting of the consequences of too much inequality. This leads to the relaxation of rules and norms intended to reduce the risk of economic collapse, for example when US President Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation.
The conjuring
What happens when inequality runs out of control? It could mean revolution and regicide, but there were times when hyper-capitalism accepted greater regulation and self-restraint, such as during the Depression and following World War II. But those lessons have recently been forgotten, with consequences including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of nationalism in many countries. The recently (and still?) dominant ideology – neoliberalism – was bound to worsen inequality, and it remains to be seen if these new regimes will do any better. These reactions could, as Marx foreshadowed, presage an out of control sorcerer, such as a period of neo-totalitarianism, (or illiberalism such as David Frum has justargued in an excellent example in the Atlantic called "How to Build an Autocracy: The preconditions are present in the U.S. today.") Social media and search engines have apparently been manipulated by narrow interests, and it can be argued such dark methods paved the way for Trump’s election.
However, this is not the 1930s in Europe and Japan. With vigilance, social institutions and civil society could lead to a more prosperous and fairer future, despite President Trump’s rule, despite the clear existence of a US "shadow state" as documented by David Talbot and many others. Trump's phone call with Tsai Ing-wen, not only gave hope in Taiwan, but must also have heartened Tibetans.
Some early signs of President Trump’s rule are promising, such as the global protests following President Trump’s inauguration.
On the other hand Frum worries these will be dismissed by the new President. Other signs are disturbing, to anyone hoping for less inequality or action on climate change. These include the appointment of the Goldman Sachs and hedge-fund veteran Steven Mnuchin, for US Treasury Secretary. As Joseph Stiglitz notes, the expertise he will bring to the job will be in tax avoidance, not constructing a well-designed tax system. Also of concern is the the appointment of Rex Tillerson, the chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. But even on climate change the position is not hopeless. The drive toward renewable energy, including its declining prices, is now so strong that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industry will continue to decline. Note, however, that even if this occurs, greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise, and the rate of increase could even steepen due to reinforcing feedbacks, such as from melting tundra.
Irrespective of the effectiveness of politicians and the big, often neoliberal-minded development foundations (such as the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation*, (1) and even the Wellcome Trust, which continues to invest in fossil fuels) groups such as BODHI and the Aryaloka Education Society (cover story for newsletter number 50) are needed to reduce inequality and give hope at the ground level.
1. According to the prolific Professor Michael Hudson, the Saudi Arabian government has been a major funder of the Clinton Foundation, a view supported by a fact checking website.
This essay was originally published on Global Change Musings in December 2016. First published here February, 2017
When BODHI was co-founded in 1989 (in the US as well as Australia) it became one of the world’s first Buddhist-influenced non-government organizations seeking to improve social and environmental justice for all. Both major forms of Buddhism recognise the importance of compassion. A central tenet of Mahayana Buddhism (which includes Tibetan Buddhism) is the concept of “bodhicitta”, the wish to be of benefit to all beings. An important aspect of Theravada Buddhism is the concept and practice of “metta”, or loving kindness. In principle, both forms of compassion extend to all forms of life, including people of any race, faith, ethnicity, status or caste.
The experience of each of the co-founders of BODHI was that organized and practical expressions of either metta or bodhicitta were rare, at least by Buddhists and Buddhist sympathisers. We knew, of course, that Buddhist teachings had a powerful, generally positive influence in many countries, but also that many nominally Buddhist counties had experienced internal conflict and overt aggression - but so had many Christian and Muslim countries. We also knew of organized programmes in Western countries to raise funds for Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal, efforts which had commenced soon after His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama had fled the Chinese invaders in 1959, accompanied by about 80,000 of his countrymen, in the first of several waves. (See an interview with the Dalai Lama in 1960.) We also knew of small groups working to support individuals, families, monastics and monasteries. But we did not know of any Buddhist-influenced organizations similar in aspiration to OxFam, Save the Children Fund, or the Catholic aid organization Caritas.
Although a Buddhist group called Tzu Chi (“compassionate relief”) had been founded in Taiwan in 1966 we did not, at that stage, know of it. Nor (in those pre-internet days, when research was more difficult) did we know of the Karuna Trust, which, based in the UK, had then been active for several years. We knew of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, but its focus was more on dialogue and the promotion of peace, than on poverty relief via partners, as we intended.
However, few among these groups seek to actively promote poverty relief and poverty prevention. BODHI, though small, has supported almost 50 such projects, mainly in India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Tibet. We also have tried to raise concerns about numerous issues relevant to social justice, in our newsletters (of which this is the 50th), on our various websites, and via Facebook. Recurrent themes have included climate change, inequality, racial and other forms of discrimination and the lack of female education and empowerment and its consequent effect on poverty. Compared to the need, BODHI can only make a small difference, but we can do far more collectively than as individuals.