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

It’s hard to talk about much other than Ukraine right now—the lives being lost, the homes destroyed, and the fear of additional escalation with each passing hour. So it’s no surprise that when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report dropped Monday, news that the world’s top researchers think climate change is accelerating and will be worse than anticipated flashed only briefly into front-page headlines around the globe.

 

Yet the war in Ukraine, perhaps more than any previous conflict, has illuminated the ways in which climate and energy transition are now a part of every conflict—and every policy conversation. In the past week, Germany’s chancellor has paused the approval process for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline; major oil companies, including Shell, BP, and Exxon, have pulled out of Russia; American gas companies have drooled all over conference calls as they plan to replace Russian gas in Europe; and the German government has drafted a plan to shorten its timeline to 100 percent renewable energy by five years. 

 

Kate Aronoff wrote about American gas companies’ opportunism during this crisis last week. “That U.S. fossil fuels are and will continue being tapped to fill gaps in European energy supplies isn’t all that controversial,” she noted. “What companies seem especially eager for, though, is the potential to ink long-term deals and greenlight infrastructure that could stay online for decades to come.” Kate pointed to an earnings call held by liquid natural gas–exporting giant Cheniere on Thursday. As she reported:

“It’s tragic what’s going on in Eastern Europe, and it saddens me to see the satellite images on the newscreen that we’ve all witnessed this morning,” Cheniere President and CEO Jack Fusco said, responding to JP Morgan analyst Jeremy Tonet’s question about the company’s prospects on the continent in light of the conflict. “But if anything, these high prices, the volatility, drive even more energy security and long-term contracting.”

 

The abrupt pivot from “deaths are bad” to “but war is good for our numbers” would be chilling in any scenario. But it’s particularly hard to square with the new IPCC report, which some are calling the “bleakest warning yet” of the dangers of unfettered fossil fuel use and where that could lead. Kate took a look at the report, in a piece published this morning.

 

One of the things she zeroed in on is the set of different eventualities, somewhat euphemistically called “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” that it details. “At the most basic level, SSPs are empirically grounded narratives about possible futures, mapped along an axis of how politically and  logistically challenging mitigation and adaptation might be. For more than a decade, climate researchers have been gathering to compile these storylines,” she wrote. The most troubling of the five SSPs, according to Kate, is SSP3—a scenario of retrenched nationalism, rising authoritarianism, and a focus on territorial and economic squabbles rather than cooperative approaches to global risk.

 

We’re not there yet, Kate wrote, but “the world looks a bit closer to SSP3 than it might have a few weeks ago,” as rich governments eye increased military spending rather than funding ambitious climate policy or climate aid to cash-strapped countries. 

 

Kate’s piece is worth reading in full and keeping in mind as you encounter coverage of Western leaders’ responses to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Not all those responses, this latest climate report makes clear, give the world a chance at a peaceful and sustainable future. Stopping Putin’s assault on Ukraine will be hard. But the climate crisis is stopping for no one. 

 

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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