A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

Rather than giving in to defeatism, though—spending the rest of our lives in hedonistic orgies in the back seat as politicians continue to speed past the off-ramp—it’s worth focusing on a few key points.

First and foremost, there is a major problem with this IPCC report: Its 42-page “summary for policymakers,” as Emily Atkin wrote in her newsletter, Heated, never mentions the key driver of global warming worldwide: fossil fuels. The original draft did discuss fossil fuels, according to Deutsche Welle reporter Ajit Niranjan’s sources. But this was later cut. As a result, “​You’ll learn the world is ending,” Emily wrote, “and you will not know who to blame.” This kind of psychological situation—dire news, seemingly nothing to do about it—pretty much guarantees that people will feel overwhelmed and tune out. They shouldn’t.

The Biden administration is now on track to approve more oil and gas drilling on public lands—activity that accounts for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—than any administration since George W. Bush. Climate envoy John Kerry has balked at the idea of committing the U.S. to a coal phaseout. Politicians who call themselves climate hawks are still going out of their way to make clear that there’s a vibrant future ahead for the companies that funded climate denial, whose business model remains built around burning up and extracting as many fossil fuels as possible. Administration officials, meanwhile, have talked repeatedly about the need to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This is climate denial. These politicians don’t dispute that the climate is changing, but they are absolutely in denial about what curbing it would entail.

Insofar as there is a silver lining to this existential dread-bomb of a report, it is this: The steps needed to avoid catastrophe are not a mystery. They are not unknown. While transitioning rapidly off fossil fuels would involve some serious changes, it’s not actually impossible. We have both the technology (renewable energy, energy efficiency, etc.) and the planning solutions (rearranging living patterns and supply chains for minimal emissions and transport, investing in low-emissions sectors) needed to do it.

Molly Taft at Earther highlighted a more specific point. This report, more than prior IPCC reports, emphasizes the role of methane—a shorter-lived but more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide—in global warming. “Cutting methane emissions is the single fastest, most effective way there is to slow the rate of warming right now,” says Environmental Defense Fund climate scientist Ilissa Ocko in the article.

That’s perversely comforting, Molly pointed out, because “we actually have a lot of the technology and tools we need to get methane emissions down now.” Agriculture—specifically, the meat industry—is the single biggest contributor to global methane emissions, closely followed by fossil fuels. (Fracking, in particular, has been identified as a primary suspect in the global methane spike from 2006 onward.) Reducing meat consumption, plugging abandoned oil wells, and banning flaring and fracking could make a huge difference, fast.

It’s therefore particularly outrageous that Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Angus King of Maine, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Jon Tester of Montana joined Republicans Tuesday night to support an amendment prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from banning fracking. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa also won 17 Democratic senators to her side on an amendment to bar the EPA from regulating livestock methane emissions. Coming only a day after the IPCC report’s release, those votes will be judged incredibly harshly by history.

TNR will be publishing several essays in the next few days about what to do with all this information—what it means to parent at this precarious and enraging time, and what the prospects are for political action despite obstruction in Congress. But I want to close this by pointing you to a striking piece from Earther’s Brian Kahn, who, like many, was pushing back against the chorus of defeatism on social media earlier this week:

Meteorologist and Currently founder Eric Holthaus has a phrase he uses often, noting “you were born at just the right moment to change everything.” My instant reaction is usually to shy away from mushy sentiments for fear of seeming naive. But as I read the report, I couldn’t help but realize that yes, this is exactly right. This moment isn’t simply perilous—it’s an opportunity.…

Make no mistake that there are powerful forces aligned against that change. There are those who aim to preserve existing hierarchies and an economy based on the extraction of oil. Of wealth. Of dignity. And they will fight like hell, too. Those forces were around during past IPCC reports. The difference now, though, is that they are weaker than ever.

“When that first domino falls—and I’m pretty brashly confident that we’re powerful enough to push the fucking thing over ASAP—it’s going to be a moment in history like nothing else. It’s going to happen in slow motion but when we’re old, we’ll remember it as a millisecond,” Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst, said in a tweet about ending the coal industry and fossil fuel use as a whole. That proclamation has been rattling around my brain for weeks.

This crisis is simultaneously existential, overwhelming, impossibly urgent—and fixable. That last part is the single most essential component of any report or discussion about climate change. Never forget it.

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