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Leonardo DiCaprio as an astronomer in the film Don’t Look Up Courtesy of Netflix |
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Happy New Year! As we gingerly navigate the early days of 2022, conscious of the omicron surge, the anniversary of last year’s Capitol riot, and the midterms to come, I’d like to draw your attention to two pieces from this week to ease you back into climate coverage.
First, as mentioned in the final Apocalypse Soon newsletter of 2021, staff writer Kate Aronoff has a track record of accurately predicting trends in climate politics. Check out her latest piece, which looks at a development you’re likely to hear more about in the coming months: the attempt among some segments of the conservative movement to actually outlaw sustainable investing, declaring that it discriminates against fossil fuel companies.
Kate opens by looking at a bill in West Virginia that appears to respond to pressure from the coal industry. “We believe West Virginia’s Legislature should develop legislation to make it an unlawful, discriminatory practice for financial institutions or insurance companies to assess higher premiums, surcharges or interest based on a company’s fossil energy holdings,” read an email from West Virginia Coal Association president Chris Hamilton to Republican West Virginia House of Delegates member Zack Maynard, which nonprofit watchdog group InfluenceMap obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, and which Kate was able to review.
“Fifteen days later, on February 23, 2021, this precise sort of ‘anti-ESG legislation’ was sitting in Maynard’s inbox, from Hamilton,” Kate reports. [ESG is shorthand for environmental, social, and governance-related investment.] On March 13, Maynard became the lead sponsor of a virtually identical bill, H.B. 3084.”
Outlawing sustainable investing could slow down the switch to renewables, in addition to really screwing over some pension funds, Kate points out: The fossil fuel stocks these bills want to force people to invest in “have reliably underperformed the S&P 500 over the last decade.”
Kate’s piece is an important look at what may be ahead in 2022. But for those not quite ready to plunge back into policy waters just yet, maybe check out Eleanor Cummins’s essay on Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s comet disaster film, which serves as an allegory for politicians’ inaction on climate change. |
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{{#if }} 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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{{/if}} Critics and climate writers have hotly debated the merits of Don’t Look Up, which debuted on Netflix on December 24 and is currently the streaming service’s third-most-watched film. Eleanor gently reminds people that whatever their personal reaction to the film, it clearly marks a shift in the national consciousness. Charting the trajectory of climate movies from 1973’s Soylent Green to the present, Eleanor points out that we need art helping us make sense of the current moment: |
In 2014, the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. “I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being,” she said in her acceptance speech. “And even imagine some real grounds for hope.” Two years into the climate’s “decisive decade,” that real, hard hope—a hope rooted in action, not magical thinking, with all the compromises and attendant details—is still largely missing. Where is the marriage plot set in a carbon-regulating city that successfully retreated from the fire lines, or the gangster film about organized crime in renewable energy? The sitcom about a family whose full house is on stilts above the waterline, or the Wall Street movie about emissions pricing? |
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Don’t Look Up is the first movie to make it big while attempting to talk frankly about the crisis we face. (Read Kate’s interview with the director if you’re interested in a taste of the politics behind it.) Despite some frustrating and unhelpful oversimplification in McKay’s allegory, that’s a serious accomplishment. The next task, Eleanor suggests, might be to imagine a movie that can make it big while envisioning a solution. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s how many Americans live in counties hit by climate disasters in 2021, according to new analysis from The Washington Post. |
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Senator Joe Manchin says he still supports the climate provisions in the Build Back Better package: “I think that the climate thing is one that we probably can come to agreement much easier than anything else,” he told reporters on Tuesday. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Katharine Hayhoe has emerged in recent years as a particularly thoughtful writer and speaker about climate change. Both a climate scientist and an evangelical Christian, she’s adept at persuading a wide range of people of the need for climate action. The New York Times published an interview with her this week. If you’re still tiptoeing into 2022 with trepidation, this is a good piece to start with: |
The misconception is that climate action isn’t occurring because of the people who aren’t on board with it. The reality is that more than 70 percent of people in the U.S. are already worried about climate change, and about 35 percent of those are really worried. So the biggest problem is not the people who aren’t on board; the biggest problem is the people who don’t know what to do. And if we don’t know what to do, we do nothing. Just start by doing something, anything, and then talk about it! Talk about how it matters to your family, your home, your city, the activity that you love. Connect the dots to your heart so you don’t see climate change as a separate bucket but rather as a hole in the bucket of every other thing that you already care about in your life. |
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