  Macroscopic irreversible processes emerge from fundamental physical laws of
reversible character. The source of the local irreversibility seems to be not
in the laws themselves but in the initial and boundary conditions of the
equations that represent the laws. In this work we propose that the screening
of currents by black hole event horizons determines, locally, a preferred
direction for the flux of electromagnetic energy. We study the growth of black
hole event horizons due to the cosmological expansion and accretion of cosmic
microwave background radiation, for different cosmological models. We propose
generalized McVittie co-moving metrics and integrate the rate of accretion of
cosmic microwave background radiation onto a supermassive black hole over
cosmic time. We find that for flat, open, and closed Friedmann cosmological
models, the ratio of the total area of the black hole event horizons with
respect to the area of a radial co-moving space-like hypersurface always
increases. Since accretion of cosmic radiation sets an absolute lower limit to
the total matter accreted by black holes, this implies that the causal past and
future are not mirror symmetric for any spacetime event. The asymmetry causes a
net Poynting flux in the global future direction; the latter is in turn related
to the ever increasing thermodynamic entropy. Thus, we expose a connection
between four different "time arrows": cosmological, electromagnetic,
gravitational, and thermodynamic.
