The Major Threat. Selling the Present to Buy the Future.

The major threat I speak of here is one that is even harsher than any pandemic that may attack our planet. It is the threat of global warming.
The world urgently needs to give more attention to the environmental disaster which will affect us all.
In 1999, I was the President of the UN Environment Accounting team that worked within the context of a program entitled, “Environment Accounting System”. The team was facing a new challenge due to the absence of accounting parameters in this field. The material parameters of sale and purchase could not be applied to the environment, hence the difficulty of classification. That was my mission as head of the United Nations International Standards of Accounting and Reporting (UNISAR) team, the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), headquartered in New York, and of the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board in London.

I worked then to form a team of all accounting boards and associations worldwide. After a year’s work, we came up with an accounting draft law that stipulated, “Every company shall register in its results a reserve for the negative environmental impacts of its work.” This would include, for example, aviation or oil companies. Each company would be ordained, by virtue of this law, to register the extent of pollution it caused to the environment, according to which it would be held accountable. Among the fundamental obligations of companies set forth in the said law is that “The transgressing company shall repair the negative impacts caused by pollution and indemnify any party that has a rightful claim to indemnification.” The challenge was getting this accounting law approved and which parties would have a greater sense of responsibility and take the initiative of recognizing the law.
Surprisingly, the US ambassador to the UN immediately demanded to attend the closing session of the work team, along with the British ambassador; a demand which was more than welcome. At the session, he said, “All your efforts in this field are fruitless because such matters are determined by the money market in Washington.” When asked to elaborate, he explained that the Financial Market Capital, New York, must approve the law. The British ambassador concurred.
“Thank you both, Your Excellencies,” I said, “I will submit a report on this matter to the Secretary General, who has assigned me this mission.” When the session was over, I was sure that the draft law would never pass and it never did. When I submitted the draft law to the Secretary General, it was neither discussed nor issued due to the dual US-British objection to its resolutions.
This objection was well explained when the US President said in his election campaign in 2014 that climate change is a Chinese hoax and part of a plot designed to bring down US business and industries. “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US industry non-competitive.” He warned that he would never allow any resolution or law to impede US production companies on the pretext of their polluting impact on the environment. That position was the cause of his success in that election.
We are in a real predicament. The environmental hazards cannot be combatted except by a unanimous resolution of the UN that ordains all countries in the world to preserve competition rights and maintain a standard level of environmental control.

The world today lives in the era of the knowledge revolution, fueled by artificial intelligence. If this intelligence can make objects think smartly, speak and perform human activities in a better way, if it can interfere with the biology of our bodies and our mental capabilities, no one then can deny that this unprecedented power of artificial intelligence can develop a system for protecting the environment from poisonous or harmful emissions.
I wish that the UN would form an artificial intelligence team to be led by experts from China and the US and to have specialists from major countries in the technological field as members. The mission of the team should not be confined to just describing the situation, but it should be an initiative for finding solutions. We cannot dream of the future at the detriment of the present. It is not an impossible task to develop a way to treat harmful emissions that will sure endanger the future of humanity unless stopped!

We need to find a way to guarantee that this planet will continue to be a habitable place for the sustainability of human life. To do this, we should think of how we live and how the coming generations will find the earth. Destruction of the environment means the collapse of our physical and mental capabilities, which will lead to rapid loss of the basic needs of life, then loss of life itself. We are not for an invention intended to make someone wealthy, but a source of endless wealth for you, other people, the entire earth, and myself.
Our perceptions are confined to the individual self, family, company, group, or country instead of a comprehensive humanitarian perception that encompasses us all. To develop this perception, we need to move forward from the knowledge revolution to a wisdom revolution. This will build human societies willing to collaborate to come up with an invention, a solution that will not drive us to build delusions of a wealthy future over the ruins of the real present. Whoever chooses to pursue such a future to accumulate individual wealth will not find a safe place to indulge in his whims. This is the problem - we are selling the present to buy the future!