A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Volunteer firefighters practice during a wildfire training course. | David Ryder/Getty |
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The day after his inauguration, President Biden announced a suspension of new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, one of several modest steps he’s taken to slow the world’s surge toward uninhabitability. But even this move was too ambitious for one federal judge, who on Tuesday granted a preliminary injunction against the policy. Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee in Louisiana, ruled that only Congress can halt these leases because Congress originally opened the lands to leasing. The Biden administration’s pause on new leases may have been the most direct action the administration had taken on climate policy: Whereas rejoining the Paris Agreement was symbolically important, curtailing fossil fuel extraction and burning immediately is essential to reducing global warming. And yet the pause wouldn’t affect existing operations or do anything about drilling on private land. It’s not even certain that it would hurt the fossil fuel industry, which tends to have a problem with oversupply, and whose forecasters were pretty optimistic about 2021 even after the drilling pause became known. |
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| 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 |
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This setback is especially troubling in light of two other ongoing stories: The American West is facing record-breaking temperatures amid an ongoing multidecade drought. Areas of Montana and Wyoming have seen temperatures top 100 degrees. These are not even southerly states, and it’s early June. Summer has not even started. The wildfire risk is skyrocketing. Meanwhile, as the White House negotiates with GOP leaders on an infrastructure package, there have been reports that climate policy could end up on the cutting room floor. Progressive Democrats are scrambling to prevent that from happening, but it’s not clear how that will play out, Kate Aronoff reports. And as Nick Martin argued, it’s particularly ironic that some of the senators treating climate as a niche issue represent the Western states facing searing temperatures. Several of these states will soon need to cut their water use by unfathomable percentages due to droughts driven by global warming. What does all of this add up to? In TNR’s April issue, Ben Ehrenreich had one word for this political morass: “suicide.” —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s the amount of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the food system, according to a new study. |
California’s terrifyingly low water levels could help solve the mystery of a 1965 plane crash. |
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The extreme heat in the region is creating optimal wildfire conditions. |
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| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Biodiversity and climate change can no longer be treated as separate problems. That’s the message of a new report covered by The New York Times last week. We cannot rely on single-minded tree-planting campaigns to get us out of the climate crisis. |
Unless the world stops treating climate change and biodiversity collapse as separate issues, neither problem can be addressed effectively, according to a report issued Thursday by researchers from two leading international scientific panels. “These two topics are more deeply intertwined than originally thought,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chairman of the scientific steering committee that produced the report. They are also inextricably tied to human well being. But global policies usually target one or the other, leading to unintended consequences.… In Brazil, parts of the Cerrado, a biodiverse savanna that stores large amounts of carbon, have been planted with monocultures of eucalyptus and pine in an attempt to meet a global reforestation goal. The result, researchers have written separately, is an “impending ecological disaster” because they destroy the native ecosystem and the livelihoods of local communities, including Indigenous people. |
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