A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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This week opened with news that we have now reached a concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—419 parts per million—that is 50 percent higher than preindustrial levels. This news is particularly frustrating for three reasons. First, countless people predicted this would happen, back when others were overhyping the emissions dips during pandemic shutdowns. “Fundamentally nothing has changed,” Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans told Quartz climate reporter Tim McDonnell last April, responding to news of the temporary slow in emissions. “Once people get back in their cars, it’s the same cars. We just hit pause, but reaching any climate goal requires structural shifts.” In September 2020, CNN published a huge multimedia feature on the temporary pandemic slowdown and the desperate need to start phasing out fossil fuels immediately. “Instead,” the authors wrote, “some of the biggest fossil fuel-producing countries are injecting taxpayer money into propping up polluting industries.” The feature portrayed the temporary Covid dip as “the one chance we have” and argued that governments were wasting it. |
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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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Second, people misunderstood the emissions drop to begin with. As James Temple, senior editor at MIT Technology Review, wrote on Twitter in response to the record-breaking CO2 concentrations: |
Third, this news comes amid ample evidence that wealthy governments—and the politicians who compose them—still haven’t learned the lesson that fossil fuel production has to stop for global warming to be slowed. Over the weekend, protesters flocked to the Mississippi River site in Minnesota where Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline is set to expand through fragile wetland ecosystems overlapping with tribal lands. In the past two days, many of those activists have been arrested, with footage emerging of a Department of Homeland Security helicopter seemingly attempting to disperse them with wind and debris from its blades. The Biden administration—despite its public commitments to respecting tribal sovereignty and prioritizing climate, as well as the good publicity it sought by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline in Biden’s first week in office—appears desperate to avoid getting involved in this fight. “Late last month,” The New York Times reported, “Ms. Houska, the tribal attorney, pressed top Biden officials on what she saw as policy hypocrisy: Having canceled Keystone XL, how could the administration then allow Line 3 to go forward? ... A White House spokesman declined to comment on the meeting.”
This is in keeping with the Biden administration’s general position on fossil fuel transition, which could be described, at best, as hard to pin down. As TNR’s Nick Martin has repeatedly observed, administration officials have been going out of their way in interviews to avoid saying anything concrete about shutting down coal production or pumping the brakes on new pipelines. Meanwhile, even the International Energy Agency admits that it’s time to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure. You could argue that the White House’s wishy-washiness is a necessary strategic position of moderation, as the administration tries to wrangle an uncooperative Senate. (You’ll see Nick writing about this hypothesis—and the problems with it—shortly.) But as Kate Aronoff also points out this week, Democrats have been remarkably feckless on the fossil fuel issue even in state legislatures they control. The New York state legislature, for example, is about to close yet another session without passing any of the crucial bills needed to make its 2019 emissions targets achievable. “Lawmakers are hiding behind secretive processes that allow legislation to be stalled anonymously,” Kate wrote. “That lets them avoid alienating either environmentalists or fossil fuel interests. If forced to take a side during a public vote, they’d wind up riling one of these two groups.” At what point does publicly acknowledging the climate crisis while refusing to back the only policies that will actually curb it officially constitute a form of climate denial? A whole lot of politicians seem determined to find out. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s the amount of gross domestic product G7 countries will lose each year if temperatures rise by a predicted 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, based on current pledges. That’s twice the GDP loss that Covid-19 inflicted. Read The Guardian’s write-up of the new research here. |
The Interior Department seems to be expanding its offshore wind ambitions, sending out feelers about development in the Gulf of Mexico. |
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| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
| The Washington Post has a fascinating piece this week about an Alaska Native group striking a deal to sell surface rights to its land as conservation easements to the Conservation Fund, both raising money for the community and making it harder for the nearby Pebble Mine project to expand and damage the sockeye salmon habitat. Don’t miss the photos on this piece, either. |
Growing up in a small village in southwest Alaska, Sarah Thiele had a childhood defined by sockeye salmon. Her father caught the silvery-red fish in the summer by the net-full as a commercial fisherman while her mother would cure and cold-smoke hundreds of filets so Thiele and her eight siblings, plus the family’s team of sled dogs, could dine on sockeye year-round. Now 66, Thiele is a board member of the Pedro Bay Corp., an Alaska Native group that owns land near Bristol Bay, the site of the most prolific sockeye fishery in the world. It is also the precise spot where the backers of the Pebble Mine hope to build a road to transport ore. |
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