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

To be frank, I’ve been dreading writing this week’s newsletter. Friday is Earth Day, so this is the Earth Day newsletter, and boy does it come at a dispiriting time for those keeping track of the accelerating climate crisis.

As TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote Friday, over the last few weeks the Biden administration has largely abandoned a climate agenda that was once widely praised as “historic.” The White House can only blame part of that on Joe Manchin, who effectively tanked the Build Back Better Act in the Senate a few months ago. Spooked by rising gas prices amid the war in Ukraine, the administration on Friday announced its intention to open up some 144,000 acres of public land for oil and gas production, despite ample evidence—even from the International Energy Agency—that no amount of further fossil fuel development is consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Interior Department will raise royalties on drilling to 18.75 percent, but that’s scant comfort to climate activists who remember when Biden promised to halt new drilling on federal lands entirely, calling climate change an “existential threat.”

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As Kate wrote on Friday while exploring murky reports that White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy is about to step down, it’s not hard to see why some political strategists might be advising Biden to do everything he can to please oil and gas companies and bring prices down in the next few months:

[T]he midterm elections are coming up fast. If Biden wants to appeal to voters, he needs to focus on the things they care about, gas prices and inflation chief among them. That might mean trading the support of constituencies and interest groups traditionally less likely to vote in midterm elections—young people and environmentalists—for more conservative middle-class swing voters who do. If that involves spewing a few hundred million more tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then so be it.

That rationale doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, though. For one thing, it’s unlikely these new leases would either affect prices or impress middle-class swing voters enough to have a meaningful effect on the November elections. And there’s another problem, as Kate pointed out: “With Democrats likely to lose the House in any case in the fall, and a Supreme Court poised to kneecap the EPA, this may be the last chance for at least a decade for the party to govern as if the climate matters.”

Earth Day, in short, feels both particularly urgent this year and particularly frustrating: The day has long been a festival of inflated press releases, with companies taking to social media to praise their own minimal efforts at sustainability, or politicians posing for photos as they plant a single sapling. Each year, the dissonance between show and reality grows. And from an editor’s perspective, it becomes increasingly difficult to publish pieces that are simultaneously true and that readers will find useful and inspiring.

That said, we’re giving it a shot over here at Apocalypse Soon! I’m excited for you to read some pieces we’ve got coming later this week—one looking at the surprisingly positive lesson from the original Earth Day, including what people concerned about climate change can learn from that, and one looking at what Biden could do right now to fight global warming if he were truly committed to it.

TNR has dropped the paywall on all of our climate content—available at the Apocalypse Soon landing page—through April 29, so you can access both these pieces and more free of charge as long as you sign in. Check out the case against lawns or for abolishing the Department of Agriculture while you’re at it. Or if you’re in more of a contemplative mood, read about the quest to find (and save) North America’s most elusive oak tree, or this classic on the climate overtones of “wellness” culture. As barbecue weather approaches, this incredible bit of international reporting on the charcoal trade is worth your time, too.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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