In his 1795 essay Towards Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant prophesied that the “spirit of commerce” would drive countries to unite in perpetual peace, not driven by morality, but profit. Since trade is incompatible with war, Kant thought, our self-interested nature would lead us to form a rule-based world-order. Two-hundred years later, globalization coincided with the development of the United Nations, the European Union, international human rights law, and other international institutions and treaties, from the World Health Organization to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. For many readers of Kant, at the end of the twentieth-century, human history seemed to be approaching its end, like a flower preparing to blossom after a cold winter.
This spirit of commerce now risks destroying the very same world-order it promised. Global trade and the Scientific Revolution, with the “slight help” of colonization, served to rapidly industrialize the Global North. Humanity would soon discover that fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—could multiply its economic productivity. In the process, we released tons of gases into the atmosphere, cranking the heat on our planet. Today, the temperature of the Earth has risen by 1.1-1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial levels. We see its adverse effects all around us. Droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods become more and more frequent, irregular, and intense. And they kill. Climate change already takes lives, brings havoc to communities, and renders the environment around us an alien force. The spirit of commerce may not have delivered perpetual peace. But its silent movements have led us to our greatest existential threat. We skipped over spring and find ourselves wilting in a summer heatwave.
Can our world-order resolve its own contradiction and tackle the climate crisis? Since the United Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified in the 1990s, states have organized thirty annual summits (known as the “Conference of the Parties” or “COP”). The COPs gave us the Paris Agreement, and because of this treaty, countries have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions. However, current scientific predictions say that we are nowhere near where we need to be to avoid climate catastrophe by the end of this century. Fortunately, science already tells us the answer to our existential problem: we need to phase out fossil fuels and transition to renewable sources of energy. In fact, in July 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN top court, affirmed that states have an obligation under international law and human rights law to address the climate crisis, including by phasing out fossil fuels.
And yet, despite these warnings from international courts, the world’s forbidden romance with fossil fuels endures. Of course, the Trump administration, head buried in sand, continues to “drill, baby, drill.” It has removed the United States from the climate treaties and more than 60 international environmental organizations. It has gone as far as to violate the UN Charter by capturing Nicolás Maduro and seizing control of Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves. (Nor is Trump shy about his intentions either). But what’s more surprising (and disappointing) is the fact that the international community itself cannot seem to comply with international law either.
Thirty UN climate summits have gone by, and in all those years, we have not gotten countries to agree on a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. This issue almost collapsed COP30, held in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025. Small-island states, Latin American countries, and the EU all pushed for the adoption of a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. But, because of firm resistance from petrostates, COP30 ended with an agreement which did not even mention fossil fuels. In other words, the UN climate decision-making body has failed to give us a plan to address the root cause of the crisis.
Why, after thirty climate summits, has the world achieved so little to phase out fossil fuels? It would be dishonest to promise a single, simple explanation for our failures. But to be sure, part of the story has to do with how the fossil fuel industry has captured our institutions. It is a little-known fact that fossil fuel lobbyists regularly attend the COPs en masse. COP30 welcomed 1600 lobbyists—1 in every 25 participants. Some of them came as observers, but many of them also came as part of state delegations, giving them full access to negotiation rooms and the ear of country delegates. For decades, the industry has amassed influence over the UN climate summits and made sure that they do not speak against fossil fuels. In doing so, this oligarchic capture has set the institutions of global climate governance in opposition to international courts.
As we witness the collapse of the post-war world-order, as we await climate catastrophe by the end of the century, despair over our powerlessness to shape our future is a common response. Yet, if we are to do something, we must hold on to hope. Without hope, humanity will simply give up, and injustice will engrain itself in the world. For this reason, philosophers must once again ask one of Kant’s fundamental questions: what may we hope for?
One possible basis for hope is the global economy. The International Energy Agency predicts that renewable energy will grow faster than any other energy source in the next decade, making the transition “inevitable” despite backlash against it. Even if Trump insists on drilling for oil, the European Union, China, and other parts of the world know the era of fossil fuel is ending. Renewable energy is becoming cheaper and more accessible than oil, coal, or natural gas. If this trend continues, then it seems that economic efficiency, like a fateful force, may drag us out of the mines, whether we are willing or not.
There is a Kantian logic behind this suggestion. Nature, Kant thought, will guarantee perpetual peace—not because human beings act out of a sense of justice innately, but because even selfish natures are capable of seeing that war and insecurity don’t pay. As he famously says in his First Supplement on the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace, “the problem of establishing a state, no matter how hard it may sound, is soluble even for a nation of devils (if only they possess understanding).” Even devils, deprived of morality but capable of intelligent foresight, would realize that they need one another to survive and live in security. Guided by self-interest, they would therefore choose a peaceful government and a rule-based world order. Even if these devils built this world-order through the devastation of the planet, once they saw that they depended on the earth that feeds them, we would expect them to change course. And if devils can do it, the Kantian hopes, then surely human beings can as well. Nature, after all, did not make us in order to destroy itself.
However, the love of profit has its limits. Can nations of devils really solve the problems of democracy, war, and the climate crisis? As history progressed, fossil fuels enriched the world’s few. And these petro-affirming “few” will continue to spread propaganda and misinformation, capture democratic processes and the UN climate summits, and instigate wars for the pursuit of oil—all to convince us that economic development goes hand in hand with their preferred energy source. Certainly, climate advocates must campaign on the affordability of renewable energy. But as long as those who rule the world do not align their private interests with the interests of all, the spirit of commerce cannot unleash its full potential to guide history towards perpetual peace.
Fortunately, there is an alternative source of hope: social movements seeking justice. If we have made any progress at all, it is because young people, workers’ unions, farmers, Indigenous peoples, academics, artists, lawyers, civil society organizations, grassroots groups, and activist coalitions have pushed for it. As long as we rely on the crooked timber of humanity to push history forward, we become vulnerable to oligarchic capture and empires. If we paint ourselves as nations of devils, as Iris Murdoch teaches us, we will come to resemble the picture. Self-interest corrodes justice because the powerful, if solely moved by profit, will always try to gain more. To save democracy and international law—and, therefore, to address the climate crisis—we need an orientation towards the common good of all, not our private interest.
Take, for example, the ICJ’s advisory opinion I mentioned earlier. This advisory opinion is the result of a long campaign that began with several law students from the Pacific Islands. They organized and convinced the island-state of Vanuatu to introduce a resolution at the UN General Assembly requesting the ICJ to speak on climate change. After a global campaign to mobilize support for climate justice, despite widespread opposition from powerful countries, the ICJ gave them a landmark ruling. The highest court in the world declared climate change as a human rights issue, and states can be liable if they fail to cooperate and resolve the crisis.
Pessimists will worry that this landmark ruling, being unenforceable, cannot amount to anything more than a piece of paper; perhaps a rosy poem. After all, the final agreement at COP30 a few months later did not even acknowledge it.
However, diplomats and fossil fuel lobbyists are not the only voices at these climate summits. They have also provided the space for a global civil society to create itself. Its members organize, mobilize, and influence the process. They often have little power, but the ICJ ruling has empowered their calls for reforming the COP. For example, a coalition of civil society organizations is demanding “conflict-of-interest” rules to “kick big polluters out.” These voices are only getting stronger within the international space; during COP30, 70,000 people flooded the streets of Belém to demand greater climate action from the world’s leaders.
It is difficult to find hope nowadays—thirty years after liberalism declared the end of history. But perhaps we, like the self-moving animals we are, can give ourselves hope. Examples of resistance and mass mobilization towards justice flood the streets every day, even in the United States. History is not over yet.
Gabriel Sánchez Ainsa
Gabriel Sánchez Ainsa is a PhD student at Northwestern University. He works on the philosophy of human rights, democracy, and climate change. He also wonders about love, hope, and the history of philosophy. Born in Madrid, he now spends his time looking at birds in Chicago's lakefront.
