Climate change is often framed as a technical problem: too much carbon, too little regulation, insufficient political will. But beneath these explanations lies a deeper disturbance—one that the German philosopher Günther Anders diagnosed decades ago, long before climate change became a household term. Anders argued that modern humanity has become obsolete relative to the technologies it has created. We can transform the world on a planetary scale, he warned, without possessing the moral and imaginative capacities to understand—or take responsibility for—what we are doing.

Anthropogenic climate change is the clearest expression of this condition. It is not simply an environmental crisis. It is a crisis of human adequacy. At the center of Anders’ thinking is the idea of the Promethean gap: the growing mismatch between what humans can do and what they can imagine, feel, and morally process. We produce technologies whose consequences far exceed our capacity to grasp them. Our tools have matured faster than our ethical faculties.

Climate change exemplifies this gap perfectly. Every day, billions of people burn fossil fuels to heat homes, transport goods, power devices, and sustain economies. Each action seems insignificant. Yet together they alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere, melt ice sheets, acidify oceans, and destabilize ecosystems across the globe. The scale of cause and effect no longer fits within ordinary moral experience. No one feels the atmosphere warming. No one can point to a single moment when “the damage was done.” And so responsibility dissolves—not because we deny the science, but because our imaginations cannot keep up with our power.

One of Anders’ most unsettling insights is that modern catastrophes often occur without villains. Climate change has no clear perpetrator. It unfolds through lawful industries, normal consumption, and everyday routines. Harm arises not from malicious intent but from participation in systems that function precisely by fragmenting responsibility. This is what makes climate change so morally elusive. No single driver causes sea levels to rise. No individual consumer destroys coral reefs.........

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