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

Illustration by Dilek Baykara

What a year. It began, as you’ll recall, with Trump supporters storming the Capitol and a chaotic Covid vaccine rollout. Let’s look back on some of the more memorable—and sometimes eerily prescient—reports, essays, and arguments from Apocalypse Soon.

As we end the year facing a huge Covid surge in cases thanks to the omicron variant, it’s worth revisiting Melody Schreiber’s piece on the importance of tracking variants, published exactly one year ago today. It’s now feeling a little too on the nose:

Viruses evolve frequently, making tiny changes every time they replicate. The more chances they have to replicate—each time they infect a new person—the more likely they are to mutate. That means the more cases we have, the more opportunities the virus has to change… “There’s still a massive disconnect between the seriousness of the situation that we’re in and the reaction and the measures,” [Dr. Michael] Worobey said. “We’ve got a long way to go before vaccines rescue us from that.”

By February, Melody, like others, was already raising the alarm that vaccine hesitancy might stop the U.S. from reaching so-called “herd immunity” levels. Simultaneously, she and other New Republic writers drew attention to the urgency of getting other countries vaccinated, rather than letting wealthy countries hoard vaccines and their patents. Without inoculating the rest of the world, these writers warned—along with doing everything possible to slow transmission through masks and testing—the virus would continue to evolve, spinning off new, vaccine-evading variants. That’s exactly what has now happened.

It feels like eons ago now, but for a while people on the East Coast were really worked up about cicadas. Here in Washington, D.C., the Brood X emergence wasn’t quite as apocalyptic as predicted. And precisely for that reason, I’d urge you to read Eleanor Cummins’s remarkable piece from May on how periodical cicadas—shimmering 13- or 17-year alarm clocks with the seemingly flawless timekeeping of a Swiss watch—may be starting to lose track of time. Scientists studying these mysterious, research-evading creatures worry climate change may be throwing them off their game.

Support Our Journalists

Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help.

Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Try The New Republic for just $10

U.S. climate watchers are facing a big disappointment this year with the apparent failure of Biden’s Build Back Better package, which originally included quite a bit of climate spending, but shrank in each successive negotiation before Joe Manchin appeared to kill the bill entirely last week. Kate Aronoff called this one with disturbing accuracy. Back in January, she warned that Democrats shouldn’t do what they did with cap-and-trade in 2009, trying to forge a bipartisan compromise that would fail anyway. She argued that catering to Manchin would be a mistake. “Instead of watering down climate policy for Manchin’s benefit,” she wrote, a better strategy would be “a climate package [that] could deliver concrete gains to West Virginia.” The pressure to vote accordingly would then come from his constituents. Doesn’t seem like Democratic leadership read that piece.

Meanwhile, Kate recently identified a worrisome emerging strategy on the right: framing sustainable investment as “discriminatory” because it excludes fossil fuels. You should expect to see fights over sustainable investment heat up in 2022. (For lighter fare, check out Kate’s piece on sea shanties from back when the internet was suddenly rediscovering such classics as “Wellerman” and “Blow the Man Down.” The history of whale oil, Kate wrote, actually has some interesting lessons for transitioning off fossil fuels.)

2021 also offered some thought-provoking pieces about how to live and act in a warming world. Chikezie Omeje blew the lid off the international charcoal trade just in time for Memorial Day barbecues: Don’t miss this incredible bit of transnational reporting showing why your charcoal could actually be coming from illegally deforested areas of Nigeria. Helen Santoro and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote about why it’s worth doubling down on local environmental justice activism rather than focusing so narrowly on national measures. Liza Featherstone pointed to some hopeful lessons from other historical moments where social change happened suddenly and unexpectedly. “This moment looks bleak,” one historian who studies the civil rights movement told Liza, “but we could be on the cusp of change.”

Advertising

On that note, Aaron Regunberg penned a pair of heartbreakingly raw, but ultimately uplifting, columns about parenting a child who will grow up amid crisis. “Of all the disastrous lessons a parent could transmit to a child born in 2021,” he concluded, “teaching them to avoid the light that exists now because of the darkness that may be coming in the future must rank among the very worst.” Instead of despairing, he proposes a kind of “covenant for the Anthropocene era”—a sacred fight “not only for survival and stability but also to keep our world from becoming a poorer, darker, lonelier place.”

As we close out the year, here are a few more pieces that serve as a much-needed antidote to climate defeatism. Kate recently wrote two articles about what can still be done to decarbonize despite Manchin’s about-face on BBB. In November, Miles Howard took a hopeful look at what Michelle Wu’s mayoral victory in Boston might mean as the city becomes a laboratory for Green New Deal policies. And don’t miss Marion Renault’s gorgeous longform piece, published Monday, about a 90-year ecological mystery and the quest to save North America’s most elusive species of oak.

The Apocalypse Soon newsletter is on a break next Wednesday, although we’ll still be publishing some big pieces to keep you thinking in the lead up to New Year’s Eve. Here’s hoping you have a happy and safe close to 2021. (And since there’s space for one more link: If by chance you’re celebrating the new year with oysters, check to see whether there’s a place to drop off the shells after your celebration: Oysters help filter water, and conservationists can turn recycled shells into new oyster reefs that help stressed ecosystems recover.)

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Introductory offer: 50% off fearless reporting. 1 year for $10.

Donate

The New Republic 1 Union Sq W Fl 6 New York, NY 10003-3303 USA

Do you want to stop receiving all emails from TNR? Unsubscribe from this list. If you stopped getting TNR emails, update your profile to resume receiving them.