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

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When this newsletter launched over a year ago, the idea was to have a short essay at the top and then a weekly news roundup below. We decided to funnel the news into a few categories: “good news,” “bad news,” a “stat of the week,” and then an excerpt from a particularly good piece our editors had read that week in another outlet (“Elsewhere in the Ecosystem”). Including good news along with bad news seemed like a no-brainer: A constant stream of bad news is overwhelming.

Over the past year, though, it’s gotten increasingly difficult to find weekly items for that “good news” section. There hasn’t been a ton of progress on climate policy or reducing emissions. A lot of so-called climate “solutions,” like carbon capture directed from power plants, haven’t worked as well as anticipated. Others, like carbon offsets, have serious problems: They overcount the amount of carbon that’s actually offset, for example, or help companies greenwash their brand while emitting as much as ever. Meanwhile, nearly every week brings a slew of new indicators—drought markers, polar ice cap estimates, revised warming predictions—suggesting that global warming is proceeding rapidly and catastrophically.

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This presents a dilemma, from an existential and editorial perspective. It’s also a pretty tough psychological hurdle. That’s the topic of the first installment of Liza Featherstone’s new TNR column. “Bombarding people with information that will shock and alarm might be productive if people really didn’t care,” Liza wrote. “But since many of us are instead busily repressing big feelings of sorrow and terror about global warming, this doomsaying approach just activates our defenses. We tune out.” That’s particularly true because most of us are already dealing with anxiety and grief in our personal lives.

I’m not entirely sure how to deal with the dilemma presented by the shrinking pool of “good” climate news each week. But Liza offered an interesting answer to the question of how to deal with climate change without getting overwhelmed and feeling the need to retreat:

The way out of this confusion is neither feel-good solutionism nor submitting to the apocalypse. Instead, we need to learn to make space, in our conversations, activism, and media, for feeling grief, anxiety, guilt, and fear about climate change, no matter how difficult or dark. Where many of us rush into the role of town crier—a Paul Revere shouting out warnings—we may be better off … helping those around us work through difficult emotions and figure out how they can take action.

Liza’s going to be writing more about the psychology and ethics of everyday life in the era of climate change. Stay tuned.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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Stat of the Week

Prior to this past weekend, that was the lowest-ever water level recorded at the Great Salt Lake, measured in 1963. Saturday’s water levels broke that record.

Good News

The Bureau of Land Management—an important office for conservation and land use policy—might soon get a director.

Bad News

TNR has repeatedly covered some of the problems with carbon offsets, which lack rigorous accounting mechanisms and can distract from the main task of reducing emissions. The West’s blazing wildfires are now highlighting another problem with offsets: They burn.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Toyota Led on Clean Cars. Now Critics Say It Works to Delay Them.

Hiroko Tabuchi’s meticulously reported piece about Toyota this week highlights the frequent gap between a company’s green image and the much messier reality:

Together with other automakers, Toyota also sided with the Trump administration in a battle with California over the Clean Air Act and sued Mexico over fuel efficiency rules. In Japan, Toyota officials argued against carbon taxes.

“Toyota has gone from a leading position to an industry laggard” in clean-car policy even as other automakers push ahead with ambitious electric vehicle plans, said Danny Magill, an analyst at InfluenceMap, a London-based think tank that tracks corporate climate lobbying. InfluenceMap gives Toyota a “D-” grade, the worst among automakers, saying it exerts policy influence to undermine public climate goals.

Hiroko Tabuchi | The New York Times