Want to hang out with TNR climate people?

This is not a TNR climate person. This is a beaver. It will make sense if you read to the end of the newsletter.

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Kate Aronoff’s feature in The New Republic’s April issue, which will arrive in many mailboxes this week, opens with a remarkable anecdote from an interview with the shah of Iran that appeared in the magazine in 1973. “In less than 100 years,” Mohammad Reza Pahlavi said, “this oil business will be finished.”

If only, right? TNR’s April issue focuses on the climate crisis, with Kate, economist Mariana Mazzucato, and journalist Ben Ehrenreich each tackling the thorny question of how society can be transformed quickly enough, thoroughly enough, to avoid catastrophe.

Mariana Mazzucato’s piece, looking at the deep imbalances of capitalism as currently practiced, argues that there are clear ways we should be reshaping the market toward communal good: Currently, “only about a fifth of finance goes into the productive economy,” while the rest is reinvested in real estate and finance—the latter of which, “in recent decades … has generally grown faster than the real economy.” The state could take a more active role, shaping market outcomes proactively through a “mission-oriented” approach, rather than only stepping in when the market has screwed up.

That piece is already up on the site; you can read it here. Ben Ehrenreich’s piece, on how reversing climate change will require a revolution in our political and economic mindset, goes live tomorrow. And Kate’s provocative proposal—that the United States join OPEC, which might just be the only institution remotely suited to helping the world transition off oil—will publish on Monday. (Or, of course, you could just subscribe to the magazine and read them all now.)

All three of these fine folks are coming together next Tuesday, at noon Eastern, to talk about how governments can fight global warming. Join us!

Before we get to the weekly climate roundup, I have a question for you: Should we start including a tweet of the week? I ask because journalist Ben Goldfarb tweeted last week that “since writing about seafaring beavers for @hakaimagazine two years ago, I’ve received a half-dozen intertidal beaver observations from folks around the world.” And he shared an adorable photo of one of them. This is the kind of content I crave. Admit it: We’re all just trying to find paying work that will compel total strangers to email us pictures of aquatic rodents at the beach for years on end. It’s the dream.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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Harvard economics professor James H. Stock has a piece up at Foreign Affairs arguing that the past five years show the U.S. economy can change and adapt far faster than people think it can, presenting “new opportunities for policymakers when it comes to the fight against climate change.”

The Amazon rain forest, as Melody Schreiber reported for TNR last week, is in far worse shape than we thought. It’s now a net carbon emitter rather than a net sink.

That’s the rate at which parts of the beach are disappearing in Avon, North Carolina, in the Outer Banks. The town, according to a feature in The New York Times this past week, depends on tourist money from the beaches and also needs $11 million to keep its main road from washing away as seas rise.

Look, I’m a sap: I dig stories about people fighting impossible fights on behalf of defenseless flora. The attempt to monitor and preserve the saguaro cactus against ever-more-unpredictable weather, and wildfires exacerbated by invasive buffel grass, is a classic in the genre:

The saguaro grows in just one part of the world: in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona; northern Mexico; a smidgen of California; and most prolifically in a mountainous swath that flows west from Tucson to the California border. It’s a landscape of rock, hard sand and open blue sky, and the saguaro has been part of it for 10,000 years.

And now, a changing climate is raising concerns about how the saguaro will survive the 21st century in an environment that’s hot and getting hotter, dry and getting drier. In a climate wake-up call, drought and record-breaking heat in 2020 contributed to wildfires that killed thousands of saguaros.

But the saguaro has friends keeping watch.

Karen Peterson | The Washington Post

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