A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Timothy A. Clary/Pool/Getty |
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In his opening speech at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday in New York, Secretary-General António Guterres eschewed throat-clearing and began excoriating the world leaders in front of him. “I am here to sound the alarm: The world must wake up,” he said. He called Covid-19, climate change, civil unrest, and inequality “the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes,” referred to persistent vaccine inequality as “a moral indictment” and “an obscenity,” and characterized the world as “on the edge of the abyss—and moving in the wrong direction.” With the U.N. Climate Conference in Glasgow fast approaching, the world is “light years away from reaching our targets,” Guterres added: |
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Promises, after all, are worthless if people do not see results in their daily lives. Failure to deliver creates space for some of the darkest impulses of humanity. It provides oxygen for easy fixes, pseudosolutions, and conspiracy theories. It is kindling to stoke ancient grievances. Cultural supremacy. Ideological dominance. Violent misogyny. The targeting of the most vulnerable, including refugees and migrants. Excellencies, we face a moment of truth. Now is the time to deliver. |
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Guterres’s speech—delivered just weeks after New York flooded catastrophically in the remnants of Hurricane Ida—landed at a frustrating moment. In his own General Assembly speech yesterday, President Biden pledged to “work with Congress” to double financing to help developing nations face climate change, bringing the sum to $11.4 billion per year by 2024. But there’s currently reason to doubt his ability to get any serious climate spending through Congress. In fact, crucial Senate swing vote Joe Manchin of West Virginia recently suggested he would vote against the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package. The package could be “America’s last best chance to pass something resembling climate policy for at least a decade,” TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted Tuesday. While some have seen Manchin’s reticence as a sign of fiscal prudence, Manchin “made half a million dollars last year off his son’s coal company, meaning that coal paid him roughly three times the $174,000 salary he made last year as a public servant,” Kate pointed out. He also “got $10,000 from Exxon Mobil for his 2018 reelection campaign. His top donor so far for the 2022 cycle is Tellurian Inc., a gas company.” Manchin is currently working to ensure that what The New York Times calls “the most powerful climate mechanism in the budget bill”—the Clean Electricity Performance Program—would reward energy companies for switching to natural gas rather than just renewables. Natural gas emits huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Whether world leaders will manage to get much done this week or at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November remains to be seen. Terrifyingly, a lot may depend not on the efficacy of international diplomacy but rather on the decisions of a handful of American senators with deep ties to fossil fuels. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Chinese President Xi Jinping announced Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly that China will cease building new coal plants abroad. As Politico Europe’s climate correspondent, Karl Mathiesen, tweeted, “This almost completely ends the international finance of coal in a single sentence.” |
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Xi didn’t say anything about domestic plants. China, The New York Times’ Somini Sengupta noted, “is building the largest fleet of coal-fired power plants within its borders, and most of its electricity still comes from coal.” The Biden administration has likewise been extremely reluctant to talk about a hard deadline for shuttering domestic coal plants. |
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Last Wednesday, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth admitted on CNBC that investing profits in renewable energy was not exactly a company priority: “We rather dividend it back to shareholders and let them plant trees.” |
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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. |
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—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Hundreds of protesters have been arrested at Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline project in Minnesota in the past few months. According to new reporting from The Intercept, this may have been part of a deliberate strategy devised by Ted Kirby, an Enbridge employee who previously helped Exxon fight protests in Nigeria: |
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Kirby appears to have put some of the lessons he learned with Exxon Mobil in Nigeria into practice on Enbridge’s project in Minnesota. Under Kirby’s watch, Enbridge pays law enforcement for pipeline-related police activity. The company’s security team members have set up trainings for local law enforcement and have been invited to attend public safety officials’ intelligence sharing meetings, where information on individual pipeline opponents has been discussed. In advance of Line 3 pipeline construction, Kirby planned meetings with local law enforcement officers to discuss Enbridge’s approach to responding to opposition. When a local sheriff expressed concern over whether law enforcement agencies would be reimbursed for pipeline-related expenses, Kirby reassured him that the security head had influence over the appointment of the public official who would approve reimbursement requests, according to the sheriff. As the sheriff recalled in an email, Kirby told him “he would be involved to ensure we are taken care of, one way or another.” |
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