A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Boston Mayor-elect Michelle Wu | Allison Dinner/Getty |
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Three days into November, it already feels like we’ve had a month’s worth of climate news. Here’s a quick recap:
The United Nations climate change conference, or COP26, kicked off this week in Glasgow. With neither the infrastructure package nor the budget bill yet passed in the Senate, President Biden was forced to show up without serious climate spending to his name. The situation was exacerbated Monday afternoon, when West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin held a press conference complaining about all the spending bills and more or less threatened not to vote for them unless his ever-evolving list of demands for cuts is met.
This undermined Biden’s position at COP26 pretty spectacularly. But Kate Aronoff wrote yesterday that it also highlighted a deeper truth: “Right now, the U.S. isn’t even close to pulling its weight in the climate fight. That may be a clarifying way to kick off the most important climate talks since the Paris Agreement was forged in 2015: with the realization that, if the world is to keep from warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), it will likely have to do so without—or even over the opposition of—the U.S.”
As Kate pointed out, “For much of the world, U.S. climate leadership has always been a shaky idea,” from the abrupt withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol to the exit from the Paris Agreement. And it’s worth remembering: “Saying ‘enough’ to fossil fuels”—for example, ending all leases on federal land, reinstating the crude oil export ban, and more—“has never been part of even the most ambitious articulation of Biden’s climate agenda,” she wrote.
On the brighter side, so far at COP26, leaders of more than 70 countries have agreed to pledge to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. In theory, this is great news. But making this pledge mean something in practice, Amy Westervelt wrote in The Nation, “won’t be easy.” So far, it doesn’t come with any “specific requirements or policies,” let alone an enforcement mechanism. And we don’t even have an accurate baseline for measuring methane reductions, thanks to underreporting of current emissions.
If you’re finding this a bit too depressing, I’d highly recommend checking out Liza Featherstone’s latest column. Liza talked to some historians who study turning points—moments of profound and sweeping social and political change, like the civil rights era in the U.S. or the end of apartheid in South Africa. She came away with some surprising reasons for optimism on the climate fight, in addition to lessons for what kinds of political messages could be most effective. Among the conclusions: While change requires immense persistence, sometimes the breakthrough comes when you least expect it. |
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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}} Finally, the top news this morning is the results from Tuesday’s elections. Right now, most politico eyes are on Virginia and New Jersey, where a Republican in the former and a race still too close to call in the latter have Democrats very worried about next year’s midterms.
If you want to dive into the minute-by-minute coverage of that, I don’t blame you. But save some time for Miles Howard’s piece about an equally important development: Michelle Wu’s victory in the mayoral race in Boston. Miles writes persuasively from the streets of Boston about the crisis that is already seizing the city—a crisis in affordable housing, in broken-down and dangerous public transit infrastructure, and more—and the crisis yet to come, as he walks streets predicted to be underwater by 2070. “Wu’s Green New Deal is an off-ramp for Boston residents who don’t want to experience a racially and economically stratified climate dystopia,” Miles writes. “On Tuesday, Boston voters decided to take it.”
Boston will now become something of a laboratory for a number of climate-adaptive and climate justice policies, as well as a testing ground for the theory that concrete changes that improve city residents’ daily lives can lead to support for broader regional climate policies. The first people to feel the effects of this, of course, will be Bostonians themselves. But you may find yourself convinced while reading this piece that others across the nation, too, should pay very close attention to what happens next.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Seventy percent of U.S. adults are now fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the White House. As health writer and frequent TNR contributor Melody Schreiber pointed out on Twitter, “It’s not enough on its own to protect against future surges and variants, but it’s progress.” |
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Thanks to the torrent of Atlantic storms this season, meteorologists are now dipping into their “supplemental list” of names. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
If you think this sounds like a knee-jerk eat-the-rich proposal, let these three relentlessly practical paragraphs from Earther’s Dharna Noor soak in: |
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A 2020 study found that private jet trips were responsible for nearly 34 million metric tons of carbon pollution in 2016, which is more than some countries produce in an entire year. Four hours of flying on a private jet emits as much greenhouse gas pollution as the average European citizen does in a year. As a 2017 Institute for Policy Studies report notes, a single cross-country trip in a Gulfstream IV—a favorite PJ of celebrities from Alex Rodriguez to Post Malone—unleashes almost double the carbon into the atmosphere [that] the average American does annually.
All that pollution is coming from a tiny percentage of people. Most people in the world don’t fly at all, mostly due to cost. And the subset of the global population that can afford to fly private is even smaller. Some estimates show that not even most multimillionaires can afford such luxury.
Yet by getting rid of private jets in the U.S., the nation would be putting a dent in pollution of an industry that simply does not need to exist. North America accounts for 69% of the world’s private jets, and the U.S. beats out every other country in private jet ownership by far. A U.S. private jet ban would consign one of the most profligate sources of emissions to the dustbin of history. |
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