In a landmark advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on 23 July 2025 that all UN member states have legal obligations under international law to address climate change, which the court described as an existential threat to life on Earth. Powerful countries too must be held responsible for their current emissions and past inaction. [This text was first published in the World & New World Journal (WNWJ) on 18 August 2025.]
Possibly in anticipation of such a ruling, Chris Wright, the US Secretary of Energy and former chief executive of Liberty Energy (an oilfield services company), published an article in The Economist a week earlier, arguing that “climate change is a by-product of progress, not an existential crisis”. Whereas the ICJ relied primarily on the IPCC reports, “which participants agree constitute the best available science on the causes, nature and consequences of climate change”, Wright’s view is based on a particular temporal logic.
According to the IPCC reports, most greenhouse gases come from burning fossil fuels, with additional emissions from agriculture, deforestation, industry, and waste. They drive global warming, which is projected to reach 1.5°C between 2021 and 2040, with 2°C likely to follow. Even 1.5°C is not considered safe for most nations, communities, and ecosystems, and according to IPCC, only deep, rapid, and sustained emission cuts can slow warming and reduce the escalating risks and damages.
The 2024 state of the climate report, published in BioScience, presents even more worrying assessments. Among other things, the report cites surveys indicating that nearly 80% of these scientists anticipate global temperatures increasing by at least 2.5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, and nearly half of them foresee a rise of at least 3°C.
Wright’s article suggests that the issue of amplifying doubt about climate change may have little to do with engagement with science but rather reflects a deeper temporal logic. This logic is rooted in a Whiggish account of progress to date, a resistance to the reality of the future and the desire for nostalgic restoration. I will explain these elements one by one.
The first tier: Whiggism
Wright disagrees with most scientific anticipations. His views are likely representative not only of the Trump II administration but also of conservative right-wing populism more generally. It is difficult to understand their climate denialism without an analysis of their views on time and temporality. The most important question concerns the reality of the future.
At the first level, Wright provides a kind of textbook example of Whig history, portraying progress as linear, inevitable, and driven by liberal values. Herbert Butterfield introduced the idea of Whig history in his influential 1931 book The Whig Interpretation of History as a critique of a specific way of writing history that he regarded as flawed and intellectually dishonest. Focusing on inevitable progress distorts historical analysis by promoting simplified cause-and-effect reasoning and selective storytelling, emphasising present-day evaluation (and glorification) over understanding the real causes of historical change.
In a Whiggish manner, Wright claims that the last 200 years have seen two big changes to the human condition: “human liberty” and affordable energy. As a result of these two things, life expectancy has nearly doubled, and the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 90% to 10%. However, Wright’s argumentation is based on non-contextual and, in that sense, timeless representations of the world, despite its “progressivism”.
For example, consider the claim that extreme poverty has dropped from 90% to 10%. It is based on using a fixed dollar threshold, such as USD 2 per day, to measure poverty over 200 years. This is misleading because most people in the 19th century lived in largely non-monetised economies where subsistence needs were met outside of market exchange, and monetary income was minimal or irrelevant. These metrics also obscure shifting and context-bound definitions of basic needs; rely on incomplete historical data; and ignore the role of colonial dispossession and structural inequality in shaping global poverty.
While it is true that life expectancy has doubled, largely due to improvements in hygiene and healthcare, the idea that extreme poverty has plummeted from 90% to under 10% also ignores the fact that the global population has grown eightfold, affecting the entire Earth system with devastating ecological and geological consequences. It further ignores that the rise in life expectancy and poverty reduction has come not only from liberalism or economic growth more generally but from ethical and political struggles and public health interventions. Often, these struggles have been fought in the name of socialism and won despite capitalist incentives, market mechanisms, and related political forces.
The second tier: blockism
At a deeper level, Wright’s views seem to presuppose what Roy Bhaskar calls “blockism”: the postulation of a simultaneous conjunctive totality of all events. This may sound abstract, but it has been a common assumption among many 20th-century physicists and philosophers that the universe forms a static, closed totality. This view stems from an atomist ontology, where individuals are seen as abstract, events follow regular patterns, time is viewed as spatial, and laws that can be expressed mathematically are considered reversible.
In such a conception, time appears as just another “spatial” dimension. According to the block universe model, the past, present, and future all exist equally and tenselessly. The universe is imagined as a four-dimensional geometric object, like a “block” of spacetime. Time is not something that “flows” or “passes”; instead, all moments are spatially extended points in a timeless whole. Blockism suggests that change and becoming are not truly real but are simply parts of our subjective experience.
The real challenge is to reconcile Whiggism and blockism. Wright is not a theorist and might not need to worry about the coherence of his ideas, but the issue is that Whiggism assumes movement, direction, and a normatively positive evolution of change, whereas the block universe denies real temporality: there is no becoming, no novelty, no agency – only timeless existence. Some versions of the block universe attempt to preserve development by proposing that the block grows. The “block” expands as new events are added to reality, but in this view, the present defines the upper boundary of the block, and the future is not truly real.
This appears to be consistent with what Wright says about climate change. Everything he has to say about global warming is limited to one short paragraph:
We will treat climate change as what it is: not an existential crisis but a real, physical phenomenon that is a by-product of progress. Yes, atmospheric CO2 has increased over time – but so has life expectancy. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Modern medicine, telecommunications and global transportation became possible. I am willing to take the modest negative trade-off for this legacy of human advancement.
From the ICJ’s perspective, this interpretation is dreadful, as the current impacts of climate change are already at odds with the rights of many groups of people. It also exhibits basic injustice, as many of the groups that suffer the most from these impacts have done next to nothing to cause the problem. However, here I am mostly concerned with the temporality of Wright’s claims. This temporality is a combination of Whiggism and blockism: so far, history has exhibited progress, but time and processes stop here, in our present moment.
The third tier: nostalgia
Wright’s view of time is not limited to an ultimately incoherent combination of Whiggism and blockism. There is also more than a mere hint of nostalgia. This is evident in the appeal of a Golden Age at the outset of his article:
I am honoured to advance President Donald Trump’s policy of bettering lives through unleashing a golden age of energy dominance – both at home and around the world.
The appeal to the Golden Age somewhat contradicts Whiggism. From a nostalgic perspective, it seems that society has been on a downward trajectory instead of progressing. In other words, regression must be possible. Within an overall Whiggish narrative, one can blame certain actors, such as the Democrats in the US political context, for causing moral and political decline.
A nationalist narrative of a “golden age” and a return to a better past (“making us great again”) is essentially connected to the denial of planetary-scale problems, such as climate change, that would clearly require novel global responses.
Climate change from a real-time perspective
By merging Whiggism with a block-universe ontology (either static or growing), one ends up with a pseudo-historicism that speaks of “progress” while erasing real time. In a way, such a view “performs change” through a highly selective historical narrative, while denying the ontological preconditions of real change. Real change – emergence, transformation, causation – requires a temporal ontology, where the future is real though not yet fully determined. Thus, there is no mention of global emissions that have continued to rise, their delayed effects, feedback loops, or emergent risks given multiple processes of intertwined changes.
Are the basic IPCC models based on real historical time? IPCC models often treat the climate system as a bounded system with internally consistent and deterministic dynamics. The IPCC relies on modelling and uses Bayesian methods to assess uncertainties in climate projections. Bayesian statistics involve updating the probability of a hypothesis as more evidence becomes available, based on prior knowledge (priors) and new data (likelihoods). Such an approach tends to be conservative (based on moving averages, for example) and assumes the quantifiability of uncertainty. It may also convey illusory precision, especially when the underlying models or data are uncertain or incomplete.
The IPCC models nonetheless indicate – in contrast to Wright – that the future is real, though the future is approached in a somewhat cautious and deterministic manner. However, many climate scientists go beyond the IPCC consensus by assuming that global heating may reach 2.5 °C or even above 3 °C degree warming by the end of the century.
From a critical scientific realist viewpoint, even such anticipations may be too circumspect. Assuming exponential growth (involving cascading events etc.) and given that recent data shows a rise from 1.0°C to 1.5°C in just 15 years (actual data taken on an annual basis, not moving averages), and using this as a basis for anticipating the future, we seem likely to reach the 2 °C mark in the 2040s and the 3 °C mark in the 2060s.
The plausibility of anticipations depends significantly on how the real openness of the future is treated. Anticipations are reflexive and can shape the future. Real time and historical change involves human freedom and ethics. The evolving universe, where time is real, is stratified, processual, and open-ended. Time involves genuine processes, real possibilities, agency, and emergent structures. Such characteristics indicate that the future is not predetermined but can be shaped by transformative agency.
To sum up, from a real historical time perspective, Wright’s combination of Whiggism, blockism, and nostalgia is a recipe for reactionary politics. Glorifying the present, thinking in a timeless way, and longing for a golden age of the past can play a major role in bringing about a dystopian planetary future.
