I WAS NOT IN GLASGOW in 2021 as 120 world leaders, 40,000 official participants, 3,886 journalists, and several thousand activists converged on the city for COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference that famously ended in disappointment. But I was in Edinburgh a year later as scores of rugby fans filled airport bars at five in the morning, overwhelming ordinary tourists, whose numbers alone were more than sufficient to signal the return of mass travel in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Posters and digital displays at every turn proclaimed the airport authority’s commitment to a carbon-free future, a goal that in the moment was surely the last thing on the minds of those dressed colorfully for the game, swilling beer, about to fly off in support of their team.
However dire the prognosis, people get on with their lives. In the summer of 2022, even as temperatures soared to record highs in England, with wildfires scorching France, a New York Times/Siena College poll determined that just 1 percent of American voters considered climate change the most important issue facing the country; among citizens under thirty, the generation most alarmed by the crisis, that number rose to a mere 3 percent. A litany of immediate concerns trumped climate: inflation, the price of gas, rising interest rates, the political divide tearing at the nation. What counts for most is the present, not a threat that, despite all evidence of a warming world, remains for many a problem of the future.
Climate science is a rarefied discipline, based on mathematical and statistical models of bewildering complexity.
But one need not be a climate expert to be haunted by the disconnect between the severity of the threat as proclaimed every day in the media and the global community’s actual response as measured not in words but in action and deed. There is a chasm between those who derive purpose and identity from the climate crisis and those for whom the crisis appears to have neither relevance nor meaning. Something is not working. Understanding why the message is not getting through—or, better said, why it has failed to set in motion a global response equal to the danger at hand—takes on greater urgency with each passing day.
With the climate community having recently convened in Dubai for the latest UN Climate Change Conference, the twenty-eighth to be held since global warming was identified as an existential threat at Stockholm in 1972, it’s an opportune moment to take a critical look at both the message and the messengers, if only to seek a more effective way forward. Any deviation from the climate consensus invites controversy. But, as my good friend the late Tom Lovejoy, who coined the term biodiversity, once remarked, what’s the point of having a reputation if you are not prepared to spend it? As much as anyone, I acknowledge the climate crisis as the defining challenge of our times. But I also recognize that realism is not apathy, and rhetoric no substitute for results. If the global energy grid is to be transformed, we must be prepared to look beneath the surface of things to see where we are, where we need to be, and what may be holding us back as we confront a peril unprecedented in the human experience.

SOME WEEKS BEFORE COP15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, I was hired by TBWA, the international advertising agency, as part of its effort to promote the launch of the Leaf, Nissan’s foray into the electric car market. The company sent me to Copenhagen with two film crews and a demanding list of deliverables—daily blog posts, stand-up reports and commentaries, interviews for YouTube, and tweets—but complete freedom to report on the conference as I saw fit. The car itself was not to be mentioned; the marketing strategy was to promote not the vehicle but the need for it, given the looming climate crisis.
The assignment introduced me to the culture of climate action at a global event that had been widely heralded as a fulcrum of history, a point of no return. A sense of urgency infused both the conference halls and the city streets, where representatives of environmental groups from all corners of the world, unable to secure a place among the formal delegates, gathered by the thousands.
The scene in the streets of Copenhagen was hopeful and exhilarating. But as COP15 ended, it left many who were there both discouraged and perplexed. If the fate of the world hung in the balance, if rising sea levels promised to flood the Nile delta and inundate the homes of 120 million people in Bangladesh and India, if nearly half the world would be forced to live without access to potable water, if the glaciers of the Andes and all the Tibetan Plateau were to be gone within our lifetimes, why was our response so feeble?
According to Rajendra Pachauri, then chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), the climate crisis could be mitigated and the world transformed with an investment equivalent to just 3 percent of the global economy. The United States alone devoted 40 percent of GDP to military victory in World War II. Why had we not mobilized and declared war on global warming?
As every voice at COP15 affirmed, the science on climate was unequivocal, the threat both extreme and immediate, and the solutions were at hand, if only politicians had the will to act. Transitioning from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources would both save the planet and generate a massive economic stimulus as thousands of “green” jobs came online to serve the needs of a transformed economy. This was the core message of Copenhagen, a climate narrative seductive in its simplicity that would, in time, be codified as the Green New Deal, celebrated as a new paradigm, a road map to a carbon-free world inspired and informed by economic justice and ecological sustainability.
And yet, as I flew back to Washington, D.C., surrounded in first class by climate luminaries, all COP15 attendees and all veterans of any number of previous UN global conferences, a few things didn’t add up. For one, I was troubled by the consistency of the climate narrative, both from those I interviewed and more particularly from the twenty or more books that I’d read in prepping for the assignment. The books, whether written by journalists, climate scientists, or activists, all shared the same narrative thread, the same citations, the same arguments.
The official multilateral scene in Copenhagen had not inspired confidence. The major industrial nations glossed and exaggerated the significance of their emission reduction plans, while countries of the global south, as well as Saudi Arabia, grew ever more insistent in their demands for compensation. The African nations spoke of reparations. The European Union, in a transparently disingenuous gesture, promised 20 percent reductions, with the chance for more, knowing full well that a 12 percent drop had already been achieved since 1990, the benchmark year, with the admission of a dozen feeble industrial economies of the former Soviet Bloc.
China offered to reduce its carbon intensity, a rhetorical sleight of hand that would allow absolute emissions to rise, provided they did not surpass the surge of industrial growth that has condemned 400,000 Chinese to die each year from toxic air. India effectively stated that having been slow to industrialize, it was now its turn to poison the world. The fact that we are all in this together, that there is only one planet, and that we all must find a way to take collective responsibility for this moment in time seemed utterly lost on the formal delegations.
Copenhagen also demonstrated the extent to which the climate issue, even then, had consumed the energy, attention, and resources of the global environmental movement. Every environmental group in the world, or so it seemed, had a presence in the city, though very few had an actual role to play or any reason to attend. The real work of protecting local forests, rivers, and lakes—the natural capital of home—had in so many places been set aside as environmental activists and professionals pursued the holy grail of climate, a target so abstract that no individual or organization needed to worry about accountability, let alone the risks and discomforts of political action or confrontation.
The conference went on for a week, and yet, in all the talk, there was one omission so glaring as to call into question the seriousness of the entire endeavor. Only a campaign focused on activity rather than results could expunge from all consideration the one fuel that can get us from where we are to where we want to be, from an economy based on carbon to one fired by the renewable energy of the sun. Surely any discussion about a carbon-free future had to consider the nuclear option, an energy source that has met, for example, 70 percent of France’s electricity needs since 1974, even while generating for the country over $3 billion a year in export revenues.
As Stewart Brand has written, nuclear may be a problem when things go terribly wrong, but fossil fuels are a problem when things go exactly as planned. If carbon is an existential threat, as speaker after speaker at COP15 proclaimed, then surely nuclear is a bridge that cannot be categorically ignored. But at Copenhagen, it most assuredly was, as if but a toxic artifact of the past.
Consider, as an aside, Pacific Gas and Electric’s recent plan, now suspended, to shut down Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuclear plant, which generates 9 percent of the state’s energy. In 2012, when California closed the nuclear plant at San Onofre, the state was forced to turn to natural gas; in terms of carbon emissions, it was the equivalent of putting two million additional cars on the road.

IN 2014, FIVE YEARS AFTER COP15, Steven Koonin, undersecretary for science in the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the science on climate was by no means settled and that we were, in fact, a long way from possessing the knowledge needed to devise good climate policies. Conventional thinking, driven largely by the media and advocates with no ability to assess the scientific literature, was, he argued, dangerously distorting policy debates on all issues related to energy, carbon emissions, and the environment.
The climate, Koonin agreed, is changing; it always has and always will. In the twentieth century, the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius). And, without doubt, humans are influencing the climate through the emissions of greenhouse gases, largely through the burning of fossil fuels. The effects of carbon dioxide will persist for centuries. But the key question is this: How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences? Answering this question, Koonin noted, is both critical and far more difficult than many assume.
By the middle of the twenty-first century, anthropogenic additions of carbon dioxide are expected to shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by 1 to 2 percent. Given the variability of climate systems, this modest figure, Koonin argued, makes it very difficult to project with confidence the consequences of human activities alone. The models that are the source of climate predictions, he added, are not precise. In science, one can ask complex questions of simple systems or simple questions of complex systems. Computer modeling of complex systems “is as much an art as a science.”
Koonin also noted the fundamental role of oceans, influences that play out on a time scale measured in centuries. Comprehensive observations of what happens in the open seas have only been available to science for the last few decades. By the same token, the impact of feedback dynamics, whether they amplify or mute various trends, cannot be determined confidently from the laws of physics and chemistry alone; they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.
The international authority on climate is the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which since 1990 has periodically surveyed the state of climate science, reviewing literally thousands of technical documents and academic papers. These reports are considered the definitive assessment of climate science at the time of their issue. Intended for policymakers and politicians, the language of the summaries distilled from these massive documents—the latest, AR6, released August 9, 2021, contained 3,949 pages—cannot be expected to reflect all the complexities of the original research. But the challenge comes when, to capture the attention of the nonscientist, conclusions and declarations suggest a precision and certainty that the science, and indeed the review process itself, may not support.
Any honest conversation, Koonin noted, must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties. Proposals for mitigation, for example, should not imply that the profound changes demanded by a carbon-free world will not come at a cost. Climate is an overriding concern, but any sweeping policy prescription must also consider other societal priorities—economic development, poverty reduction, global health, intergenerational and geographical equity. Misrepresenting the current state of climate science, he concluded, will not help us address humanity’s deepest needs and desires.
What came across as a provocative but well-reasoned argument was received by the climate community as if heresy; Koonin was attacked not just for what he said but for having said it. Some demanded that he be fired from his academic post, with little consideration given to his unassailable credentials—professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science, independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, author of more than two hundred peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science. As undersecretary for science in Obama’s Department of Energy, Koonin had been responsible for determining and prioritizing actions on both the local and national level that would most effectively reduce carbon emissions.
In the summer of 2021, quite by chance, I heard Professor Koonin speak at a literary festival in northern California. His presentation was free of judgments or polemics. He came across as neither contrarian nor iconoclast but as a serious and thoughtful scientist, properly skeptical of any orthodoxy and fully aware of the costs and consequences of implementing public policy initiatives on a global scale. His book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters was as steady as his presentation.
Not for an instant does Koonin deny that anthropogenic carbon emissions are rising or that the climate is changing. On the contrary, he questions nothing, save our reflexive faith in definitive assessments that the data may not actually confirm or support. Not that the data are necessarily wrong or distorted; the challenge is complex, and the answers not always simple or clear. Koonin’s attitude was that of a scientist, confident in what is known and humble enough to accept what remains unknown, perhaps even unknowable, for the moment. Before nations spend trillions of dollars, we need to ask whether such expenditures will make a difference. This did not strike me as being unreasonable.
I went online only to learn that Koonin had been pilloried, often in an ad hominem way. Merely to raise concerns, it seems, is to be branded a climate denier and marginalized by the scientific community. I found this disturbing. Between the actual deniers driven by ideology or cynically serving the interests of industry and the prophets of doom who have an almost biblical obsession with the coming apocalypse, there are scientists like Koonin, as well as professionals in other fields, whose voices are not being considered, at least in part because they pose awkward questions. I set out to hear what they had to say.
And what I heard over several months was a sobering assessment of the promise and complexity of the challenge before us, a message both daunting and oddly invigorating in its clarity and realism. There is a way forward, pragmatic and hopeful, that offers a positive vision certain to quell our most debilitating fears and restore open and critical dialogue to the global conversation, even while rallying governments and citizens to action, all with the goal of making real the transformation that we seek and that the climate crisis demands.

AMONG THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL of these voices is that of the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of Cool It (2007) and False Alarm (2020), books that, as the titles suggest, approach the issue of climate change from the perspective one might expect of a young man who shot to fame in 2001 with the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist. In questioning the climate consensus, Lomborg, a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has long been a lightning rod, attracting the ire of those deeply invested in the very orthodoxy that he addresses. He has been dismissed as a “closet climate denier,” and critics invariably note that he has no formal training as a climate scientist, which is true of both him and any number of prominent climate activists. Others have accused him of cherry-picking the data, ignoring facts that contradict or fail to serve his arguments. Lamentably, it’s a practice not uncommon in the climate community.
Lomborg’s sweeping analysis, to be sure, is not without flaws; notable, according to some critics, is his failure to factor into economic assessments the direct and indirect subsidies of the fossil fuel industry. But if Lomborg’s research is all “political propaganda,” as one reviewer has railed, it is seen as such largely because he dares critique the orthodoxy. Rajendra Pachauri, when chair of the IPCC, rather hysterically compared Lomborg to Adolf Hitler.
Despite the opposition of those who consider his views heretical, Lomborg’s message resonates with many because it makes sense to ordinary people. He may be wrong, for example, about a specific cost estimate, but not in his fundamental assertion that the transformation of the global energy infrastructure will involve enormous expenditures and massive transfers of wealth from individuals to governments and from nations to nations. He is certainly not wrong in casting a sharp eye on questions of compliance, efficacy, the role of the media, or the impact of apocalyptic pronouncements on the hopes and dreams of the young in all nations. And he is not misguided in his assessment of the scale of the challenge before us, as we transition to a new energy future, the features of which remain only partially known, save the certainty that global demand for power will increase by at least 50 percent by the year 2050.
Like it or not, we are a fossil fuel civilization. For three hundred years, we have consumed the ancient sunlight of the world. Currently, we burn more than ten billion tons of carbon-based fuels a year. Since the first international climate meeting in 1992, thirty-odd years ago, the world has only managed to reduce dependency on fossil fuels from 87 to 83 percent of our energy needs. To suggest that in another thirty years, by 2050, even as the world economy doubles to $185 trillion, we’ll be able to transition from 83 percent to zero is an act of faith.
To be sure, remarkable progress has been made. In just the last decade, the cost of solar power and lithium-battery technology has fallen by more than 85 percent, the cost of wind power by more than 55 percent. Investments in green energy now surpass those in fossil fuels, a market shift few could have anticipated as recently as 2009, when delegates gathered in Copenhagen for COP15.
Still, there is a very long way to go. Between 1995 and 2018, years that saw massive government subsidies for solar and wind generation, the share of global energy production derived from zero-emission sources grew by just two percentage points, reaching 15 percent. In 2021, renewable energy sources accounted for only 12 percent of total U.S. energy needs.
A study conducted by Finland’s Geological Society, published in 2021, concluded that to replace the 46,423 power stations currently operating worldwide on oil, coal, gas, and nuclear energy would require the construction of 586,000 power stations run by wind, solar, and hydrogen. According to the World Bank, as reported by Christopher Pollon, over three billion tons of minerals and metals will be needed by 2050 to build the infrastructure necessary to store and deploy renewable energy on a global scale.
Norway recently launched the first electric container ship. It can carry 120 containers, with a range of about 30 nautical miles. The biggest conventional ship in the world carries 24,000 containers, with a range of 13,000 nautical miles.
The total battery capacity currently available in the entire United States could electrify the nation for all of fourteen seconds. Tesla’s $5-billion Gigafactory in Nevada will be the world’s largest manufacturing facility for lithium batteries; its projected annual production, if taken as a whole, could handle perhaps three minutes of the nation’s electrical demands.
Storage capacity aside, there is the problem of moving the power to market. Establishing a new grid of transmission lines to get the power generated by wind and solar installations to the consumer is not trivial, given the opposition of those who may celebrate renewable energy provided the wind farms, solar fields, and transmission lines do not blemish their own communities. A 2021 survey, conducted by the University of Georgia and published in The Energy Journal, found that only 24 percent of Americans were willing to live within a mile of a solar field; a mere 17 percent would tolerate a wind farm so close to their homes.
Consider as but one example the TransWest Express, a $3-billion power line conceived to bring renewable energy from a wind farm in Wyoming to two million customers in the American Southwest. The proponents, according to Bloomberg, “spent years lining up hundreds of permits and easements from local governments and landowners along the route.” They secured all but one: Cross Mountain Ranch did not want its pristine Colorado landscape marred by power lines. Seventeen years after the start of the project, not a single wire has been strung.
In 2017, the residents of Cape Cod, among them several nationally known environmental advocates, defeated plans for a 130-turbine wind farm after the developer had invested $100 million in the project. In the wake of that decision, wind developers adopted the Starbucks rule: no project would be considered unless situated at least thirty miles away from the nearest Starbucks; those comfortable with paying five dollars for a cup of coffee included too many certain to oppose any new infrastructure in their neighborhoods.
After twenty years of government subsidies, there are about seven million electric vehicles on the road. Throughout the world, some 1.5 billion internal combustion vehicles remain in service. Flip these figures and then tally the investment of time and money necessary to transform the global transportation infrastructure. In the United States alone, there are some 150,000 gas stations. The number in China exceeds 100,000 and is growing. Replace these with charging stations. Factor in supply chains and the political and economic implications of a global competition for rare metals, cobalt and lithium in particular. Consider the environmental consequences of a soaring demand for copper; electric cars require three times as much as traditional gas-driven vehicles. Consumption of nickel, largely for truck and car batteries, is expected to increase fourfold by 2050.
In making these calculations, note that about a fifth of an electric car is made of plastic, derived from fossil fuels. Recall, too, that nearly half of its carbon footprint comes about long before it hits the road; emissions resulting from the production of electric vehicles are nearly 70 percent higher than those generated in the manufacture of gas-fueled cars, their toxicity index three times as much, due to the greater use of heavy metals. Over twenty years, a conventional car in both its manufacture and operative life accounts for around twenty-four tons of carbon dioxide; an electric vehicle of the same size about nineteen tons. Changing the energy source from gasoline to electricity addresses less than 25 percent of a vehicle’s total carbon footprint. And if the electricity used to charge a domestic fleet is generated by power plants still fired by coal or natural gas, as will certainly be the case in much of India and China for some time to come, the promise of a transformation deemed by so many to be essential to the future of the planet may remain unrealized. Going electric is surely a good thing, but so is a realistic assessment of what such a societal investment will accomplish.
At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, President Biden implored world leaders to stop burning fossil fuels. His signature legislative initiative budgeted $555 billion to address the crisis. He declared climate change to be an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.” And yet, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, the Biden administration in its first year approved 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling, 899 more than were granted in the initial twelve months of a presidency led by Donald Trump, an unabashed climate change denier. As gasoline prices surged in the summer of 2021, Biden implored Saudi Arabia to increase production; within days of returning from Scotland, his administration auctioned off eighty million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore drilling.
In 2022, as John Kerry, Biden’s leading voice on climate, warned African nations of the risks to the planet should they develop their fossil fuel resources, the United States dramatically expanded its own carbon-based energy sector, approving developments and issuing permits on a scale unequaled by any other nation. The Willow project in Alaska, authorized by Biden in 2023, is expected to yield 600 million barrels of oil. Burned as fuel, this oil will add 9.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to the emissions of two million gasoline cars. A huge number, but still just a fifth of 1 percent of America’s total carbon emissions. In 2023, even as John Kerry circled the globe sharing his conservation message, the United States, already the world’s largest producer of oil and the third-largest consumer of coal, became the biggest exporter of natural gas.
There is a chasm between rhetoric and reality, which is only deepened by the voices of public advocates and activists who have, no doubt with the best of intentions, infused the climate movement with the moral authority of a millenarian crusade. Al Gore, who has deservedly earned the highest accolades for his public stand, has described the climate crisis as “a generational mission, a moral purpose, the opportunity to . . . experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not about politics at all . . . It is a moral and spiritual challenge . . . At stake is the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth.”
In 2006, Gore declared that within ten years, the world would reach a point of no return. In 2009, he said that the entire polar ice cap would most likely melt away by 2014. In 2019, the Prince of Wales, today King Charles III, gave us eighteen months to get things right. With the release in 2021 of the latest UN scientific assessment, AR6, Secretary-General António Guterres declared a “code red for humanity,” warning that billions of people were at immediate risk. “Before this century is over,” affirmed James Lovelock, “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
In the face of such ominous predictions, climate activists feel a moral obligation to alert the world, even if it invokes the apocalyptic, exaggerates the threat, and fails to acknowledge uncertainty or doubt. As Stanford’s Stephen Schneider conceded, “We need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So, we offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
Like many advocates, Gore has little patience with anyone who questions the climate consensus. “Fifteen percent of the population,” he once said, “believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona, and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party.”
Those who make a personal fetish of climate denial, conflating opinion with facts, anger and indignation with knowledge, distortions with the truth, are surely deserving of Gore’s contempt. But a confluence of self-interest also exists among those deeply invested in the unfolding carbon crisis: politicians and the media, climate professionals and activists, the many business entities that stand to benefit from costly climate policies—manufacturers of electric vehicles, for example, including Nissan, whose ad campaign for the Leaf brought me to Copenhagen—not to mention, as Andrew Cockburn reports in Harper’s Magazine, the nascent nuclear industry.
Adhering to the consensus is just part of the culture of climate science, according to Patrick Brown, codirector of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute; it’s the only way for a young academic to get ahead. In August 2023, Brown and six colleagues, all climate specialists, published their research in Nature, arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. Their paper focused exclusively on how warming temperatures have increased the risk, danger, and frequency of extreme wildfires in California. The story was immediately picked up by the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and other media outlets. Although Brown and his coauthors were acutely aware that other factors beyond climate change were involved, they stuck with the storyline journal editors expected to hear. What appeared in Nature was good science, Brown affirms, but incomplete.
Brown came clean in a subsequent op-ed, “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published,” in The Free Press on September 12, 2023. He began by acknowledging that university researchers frequently tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted by prestigious scientific journals. “I know this,” Brown writes, “because I am one of them. Here’s how it works.”

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures . . . but through policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that journals like Nature and Science want to tell. Editors have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.
Climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

What he experienced, Brown suggests, is the norm for high-profile research publications. He cites, for example, another influential paper in Nature in which scientists determined that the two largest effects of climate change on society are deaths due to extreme heat and damage to agriculture. In a narrow sense, this may be true, as the paper demonstrated. Left out of the story is the fact that climate change is not the dominant factor in either of these impacts: heat-related deaths have been declining and crop yields have been increasing for decades despite climate change, all of which is good news and worthy of study, if only to understand how we might overcome the negative effects of a changing climate. “But studying solutions,” as Brown notes, “rather than focusing on problems is simply not going to rouse the public or the press.”
Not surprisingly, the language of doom has brought many to the point of despair. A survey reported in The Lancet of ten thousand young adults aged sixteen to twenty-five from nineteen nations found over half to be despondent daily, haunted by the specter of climate change. Three out of four characterized the future as “frightening”; 56 percent predicted that climate change will end the human race. In 2020, a large national survey in the U.K. found that one in five British children were having nightmares about climate change. In another poll, fully a third of American adults under age fortyfive expressed reluctance to have children, fearful of what the future will bring.
In 2017, the American Psychological Association diagnosed rising eco-anxiety as a syndrome, characterized by “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” A 2019 Washington Post survey of teenagers thirteen to seventeen years old found over half feeling sad, anxious, angry, helpless, and guilty, again because of what they had heard about the climate crisis. Significantly, when asked the source of their information, more than 70 percent cited television, news, and movies. This finding suggests a critical dynamic. What the public knows of the climate crisis, it learns from the media, the last filter in a long game of telephone that begins with scientific studies no layperson can understand, moves through a couple of interpretive steps that only a naïf would assume to be totally free of politics and preconceptions, and reaches finally to the media, journalists focused on the next headline, the darker the better, distilled from a story that is infinite in its complexity, with a timeline measured not in hours or days but in centuries and millennia.
Consider, by way of example, Paris and the core commitments that emerged from the 2015 climate conference. Politicians wanted to know what it would take to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Asked to envision the impossible, scientists responded with the impossible, policies that theoretically might achieve that target by 2030 but that, by definition, implied immediate and unprecedented changes to all aspects of society, initiatives that for political, technological, and cultural reasons would never be implemented. The media turned these theoretical recommendations into an existential imperative, allowing CNN to report in 2018, three years after Paris, that the “Earth has twelve years to avert climate change catastrophe.”
Such headlines, both factually wrong and ethically questionable, readily become social media memes, codified in digital realms where anonymity and boredom conspire to reinvent the truth. In 2021, John Kerry invoked CNN’s distortion when he stated during an interview on CBS, “The scientists told us three years ago we had twelve years to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left.” As the top U.S. spokesperson on the climate crisis, Kerry’s words carried the full weight of a presidency that would declare global warming to be an absolute and certain threat to life as we know it on Earth. Is it any wonder that youth and children are both frightened and angry?
In 2018, even as CNN issued its apocalyptic warning, Greta Thunberg, a student of just fifteen, began a solitary protest outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm. Her courage and conviction hit a nerve, and she soon rose to global acclaim with a bold call not for mere reductions but for an immediate end to all carbon emissions, a policy that if implemented would imply the cessation of economic activity across much of the world. There was no time to waste. “Around 2030,” she affirmed, “we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
With her dark forebodings and quirky activism, Thunberg landed on the cover of Time, the magazine’s youngest ever Person of the Year. Forbes added her to its list of the world’s one hundred most powerful women. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize not once but for three years running. In 2019, her voice reached the U.S. Congress, as Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared Thunberg’s deepest concern: “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.”
Thunberg has inspired millions, mobilizing youth around the world. Her radical prescription for the global economy is less folly, her supporters would say, than the only sane and rational response, given that the Earth faces imminent destruction. Fear fuels her activism. By her own account, she first heard about climate change at age eight and couldn’t understand why adults weren’t confronting the danger. This led to depression and despair. At eleven, she stopped talking. Avoiding food, she lost twenty-two pounds in two months. In time, Thunberg was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism, challenges that she turned into strengths. But it was not easy. She continued to struggle with depression in the years leading up to 2018 and the protest that brought her to the attention of the world.
Thunberg is today a spokesperson for a generation. With each passing month and year, her rhetoric grows more strident, her anger more stubborn and blunt. In her youthful face, there remains always the image of an innocent child of eight, haunted by fear, certain that the world is coming to an end.

WITH THE HOPES AND FEARS of all children in mind, let’s consider just a few of the climate narratives, the stories that keep us awake at night. Many young people, for example, have heard that with the melting ice in the Arctic, polar bears are on the brink of extinction. But it’s not quite so simple. Across the vast expanses of the Arctic, there are nineteen distinct populations, thirteen of which are in Canada, home to two-thirds of all polar bears. Of these, eleven are stable or increasing in numbers, thanks in part to the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears. The graphic video of an emaciated bear that went viral in 2017, attracting an audience of 2.5 billion to the National Geographic website, was highly disturbing, but if the condition of all polar bears was comparable, one would not expect their population to be increasing, as it is, across much of the range of the species. This anomaly was resolved when National Geographic acknowledged that the videographer had deliberately misrepresented the plight of a diseased and starving bear in order to advance a political agenda. The individual by his own account had set out to secure an image that would “communicate the urgency of climate change.” Fully aware that global warming had nothing to do with the bear’s condition, National Geographic nevertheless published the footage under the headline, “This is what climate change looks like.”
Ultimately what matters is whether polar bears, across all the diverse habitats of the Arctic, can eat. Warming trends affect different populations in different ways. Bears living in the highest reaches of the North may starve if the pack ice is so thick that they cannot hunt seals; an increase in open water could make hunting easier. In the southern extent of their range, by contrast, warming trends may or may not be catastrophic. Bears that live in James Bay have thrived through ice-free summers for thousands of years. In Davis Strait, the extent and thickness of sea ice, and the integrity of the floating platforms offshore from which polar bears hunt, have been declining dramatically for years. And yet the bear population there is today more than twice as large as it was forty years ago.
That polar bears are managing today doesn’t imply that their future is secure. They are creatures of the ice, and the ice is melting, most dramatically in the Arctic where the warming rate is four times as high as the global average. According to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, as reported by Bret Stephens in the New York Times, Greenland has lost 170 gigatons of ice every year for thirty years, the equivalent of 5,400 tons every second.
Elsewhere in the world, glaciers have been in retreat since the end of the Little Ice Age, a three-hundred-year period of notably cooler temperatures that began in about 1550 and ended with the onset of a warmer climatic period around 1850. When Hemingway published The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936, the mountain had lost half of its ice surface in the previous half century; dramatic recession had been recorded since 1800. When the British sailed into Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 1794, they found their way blocked by a wall of ice four thousand feet thick. By the time the naturalist John Muir visited in 1879, that glacier had retreated by more than forty miles.
Ultimately, the cause of glacial recession—be it anthropogenic carbon emissions, climatic cycles over the centuries, or a combination of both—matters less than the pressing need to do whatever is necessary to mitigate the effects, both in mountain areas where communities downstream of swollen glacial lakes are in immediate danger and throughout the Arctic where the entire way of life of the Inuit is at risk.
Without doubt, sea levels are rising. As land ice melts, and warmer air temperatures cause ocean water to expand, they will continue to do so, as has been the norm for the past twenty thousand years. The story of the Earth over the last half million years has been one of continental ice sheets ebbing and flowing, glaciers building up over the land for a hundred thousand years, with sea levels dropping as much as four hundred feet before rising again during warmer periods of glacial retreat that generally have lasted about twenty thousand years. During the last interglacial period some 125,000 years ago, sea levels were twenty feet higher than they are today.
We are currently living through another age of glacial recession that began about twelve thousand years ago. In that time, sea levels have risen four hundred feet, as much as five inches a decade until some seven thousand years ago when the rate slowed to about a foot a century, a pace that continued into our modern era. So, the key question is not whether ocean waters are rising, but rather to what extent anthropogenic climate change is augmenting a phenomenon already unfolding on a geological time scale beyond human control. At the end of the day, what matters is the undeniable fact that the sea is rising, by at least a foot a century, perhaps more. Even in the absence of a climate threat, adaptation and mitigation will be part of our future.
A warming world, most climate scientists agree, is almost certainly responsible for the extreme weather events, hurricanes among them, that have been widely reported and experienced by many in recent years. But there is an important distinction to be made between the number and severity of storms, for example, and the extent of the economic costs exacted by them. The damage caused by hurricanes has without doubt increased dramatically, but for reasons that have as much to do with settlement patterns as carbon emissions. Florida experienced eighteen major hurricanes between 1900 and 1959 and just eleven from 1960 to 2018. But the coastal population of Florida today is sixty-seven times what it was in 1900. A hurricane ripping through only Dade and Broward Counties today would affect more people than lived along the entire coast from Texas to Virginia in 1940. The damage caused in Miami by the Great Hurricane of 1926 was $1.6 billion, in adjusted dollars. If a storm of that magnitude hammered the city today, the cost would be more like $265 billion.
In 2023, smoke from a record number of forest fires in Canada enveloped the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, rendering the air hazardous and invoking truly apocalyptic images in cities from New York to Washington, D.C. Across Canada, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, some ten thousand square miles had burned by early June, normally just the beginning of a fourteen-week fire season that runs through mid-September. Altogether, fires in the terrible summer of 2023 would burn an unprecedented sixty-five thousand square miles. Here surely was evidence of climate change on a scale that would oblige governments to act and people to change their ways. Perhaps so, and all for the good, even if 2023 turns out to have been just a particularly bad fire season.
As tracked by the Canadian National Fire Database, the extent of forested land lost to fire has ranged from 23,000 square miles in 1981 and well over 29,000 square miles in 1989 and 1995 to 2,000 square miles in 2001, 15,000 square miles in 2013, with a low of just 1,200 square miles in 2020. Such fluctuations over four decades suggest at least the possibility that factors in addition to global warming are in play. Significantly, Canadian government data indicate that between 1980 and 2021, even as carbon emissions and global temperatures have increased, both the number of forest fires and the extent of area burned have, in fact, declined. The anomalous scale of the 2023 fires—which burned six times the long-term average of 10,500 square miles a year—was horrific but not necessarily indicative of a new norm.
Land consumed by wildfires in the western states and Alaska has increased from an average of three million acres in the 1980s to seven million in the 2010s. But in the 1930s, the average was 39 million acres. According to research published in Science, global fire has declined more than 25 percent since 2003, with 2020 having been one of the least active years in the fire record. That said, the number of homes built in high-risk zones in the U.S. alone has increased from half a million in 1940 to seven million in 2010. The coastal population of California has increased by six million since 2000. Eighty percent of wildfires in the United States are started by people. The grassland fires in 2021 that ravaged communities outside Boulder, Colorado, destroyed one thousand homes that were not there a generation ago. Rising temperatures may have fueled the Maui fires in 2023 that destroyed Lahaina, killing 115 Hawaiians, but ultimate responsibility for the tragedy lies with the private utility that failed to maintain power lines, state and local authorities that abandoned old dams and water storage infrastructure, and an emergency officer who elected not to sound warning sirens. As with hurricanes and coastal flooding, the best way to manage wildfires and reduce loss may be to focus on other human behavior as much as our carbon emissions.
If you live in a rich country, going vegetarian will reduce your carbon footprint by about 2 percent. Given the volume of methane released to the atmosphere by cattle, not to mention the acreage of primary forests transformed each year into pasture, such a gesture is surely a wise personal choice. Unfortunately, it may be more symbolic than effective in combatting climate change. If every American became vegetarian, U.S. emissions would decline by 5 percent; if by 2050 meat was completely expunged from the human diet, global emissions would drop by 10 percent. The world currently has 1.5 billion vegetarians, but not all avoid meat by choice or religious conviction. Many simply can’t afford it; as they move out of poverty, consumption of animal protein will almost certainly increase. Going vegan may be good for the health, but it’s not likely to change the world, unless the entire global population agrees to abandon aspirations for a diet long deemed to be a sign of economic prosperity. This may not be right, or even logical, but humans are not driven by reason alone.
By the same token, if all those getting on a commercial flight this year stayed on the ground, and the same happened until the end of the century, the rise in temperatures would be reduced by just 0.03 degrees Celsius, delaying the impact of climate change by less than a year. Avoiding nonessential travel is a personal choice, but it won’t stop airlines from expanding to serve the 80 percent of the global population that has never flown, the many millions keen to experience the mobility that those in the industrialized north have enjoyed for two generations. India, the world’s fastestgrowing aviation market, has thirty-nine airlines. In 2023, just two of these, Air India and the budget carrier Indigo, placed orders with Boeing and Airbus for nearly a thousand passenger jets. Indigo’s purchase of five hundred Airbus A320 planes was the biggest deal in the history of commercial flight. Altogether, the world’s airlines are expected to acquire 42,600 new jetliners by 2042. Clearly, instead of urging people not to fly, we should focus on the carbon efficiency of airplanes, with the ultimate goal of battery-powered flight.
In considering all of these narratives, from polar bears to jet planes, I am not for a moment suggesting that rising sea levels, melting ice, extreme weather, and wildfires are not serious concerns, or that they have no causal connection to anthropocentric climate change. Quite to the contrary. The fires that flared across Canada in the summer of 2023 released to the atmosphere an estimated 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, nearly three times the annual emissions of the country. Nor am I trivializing or dismissing the importance of personal agency when it comes to diet, air travel, and other efforts to reduce one’s carbon footprint. Ethical decisions taken by the individual once compounded by similar choices made by others are the very drivers of social change.
But to be effective, especially in allocating capital, both financial and political, it is essential to distinguish what can be achieved from what may lie beyond our control. In the early years of the climate movement, talk of mitigation and adaptation was seen as defeatist, a form of climate denial that distracted from the essential goal of cutting emissions and eliminating fossil fuels. Writing in 1992, Al Gore dismissed adaptation as a “kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins.” Reaching net zero remains a singular obsession; hence our faith in electric cars, meatless diets, and self-imposed travel restrictions, none of which, as I’ve suggested, is likely to realize its promise, given the many factors at play. If we are prepared to see the world as it is, as opposed to how we’d like it to be, then adaptation and mitigation stand out as essential strategies, just as economic development paradoxically offers the most viable pathway to climate resilience.
This brings us to the real elephant in the room—the cost of transformation. If we are truly faced with extinction, it appears almost unseemly to mention money. What can it matter if the fate of the planet is at stake? But if we consider global warming and climate change as a problem to be solved, with the goal of making the world a better place for all people, and indeed all creation, then cost-benefit analysis becomes essential.
The energy infrastructure that has been the foundation for two centuries of massive economic growth can be changed, but at a very high price. According to Goldman Sachs, establishing a support network for electric cars will alone cost $6 trillion, 8 percent of today’s global gross domestic product. Nature reports that achieving a 95 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions by 2050 will cost 11.9 percent of U.S. GDP, more than total 2019 expenditures on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
The scale of such numbers is difficult to comprehend. In 2020 alone, largely in response to the pandemic, U.S. debt rose by $4.5 trillion. The Biden administration now proposes to spend another $2 trillion over four years on climate. The cost of Biden’s proposal to eliminate emissions by 2050 breaks down to $11,000 per citizen per year. Polls suggest that even as two-thirds of Americans consider climate a major problem and believe that governments are underperforming, less than half are prepared to spend as little as $24 per capita to address it. A survey conducted in 2018 by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago found that only 16 percent of Americans were willing to pay as much as $100 a month to confront the crisis; 43 percent were not prepared to pay anything at all.
New Zealand is one of the few countries that has tried to determine what it will actually cost to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Cutting emissions by just half, plucking the low-hanging fruit, has an estimated price tag of $19 billion a year through 2050. Getting to net zero by 2050 would be much more difficult, with anticipated costs of $61 billion a year, more than the country spends on social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defense, the environment, and every other part of government combined. Given the expected temperature increase by 2100, this decision to go net zero by 2050 would postpone the warming we might expect to see on January 1, 2100, by about three weeks. In other words, a unilateral decision to eliminate all emissions would have New Zealand spending well over $3 trillion to achieve by 2100 a result that will be difficult to measure or detect.
Canadian climate activists have heralded a recent plan put forward by the Royal Bank of Canada that budgets $2 trillion to bring the nation to net zero, a per capita expenditure of more than $56,000 that would satisfy a moral imperative at the risk of having no meaningful global effect if other nations fail to enact similar policies or lack the economic capacity to do so.
This suggests another challenge: compliance. A global survey of net-zero pledges by corporations found that half had no plans whatsoever for getting there. Exxon, long a bastion of climate denial, has formally committed to reach net zero by 2050. But its pledge covers only its operations, not the emissions of the fossil fuels that it sells, which account for 85 percent of its carbon footprint, some 762 million tons of greenhouse gases each year, as much as produced by the entire nation of Germany.
Walmart, Shell, Amazon, BP, and Toyota have all declared net zero as a goal. But, like Exxon, none address the full carbon footprint of their businesses. JBS, the world’s largest meat-processing company, slaughters nine million animals a day, and over the last five years, its carbon emissions have increased 50 percent. And yet it, too, has pledged to reach net zero, by 2040. Its commitment, notes the New York Times, is as meaningful as that of a smoker who promises to quit in twenty years. In truth, many of these companies have simply punted the problem into the future. The era of climate denial, as Michael Shellenberger suggests, has given way to a time of climate promises that corporations have no intention or even ability to fulfill.
When it comes to the nation-states, rhetoric again trumps reality. On paper, net-zero pledges address 83 percent of all carbon emissions, accounting for 91 percent of global GDP. But not a single country is on track to realize its commitment. Of the 187 nations that promised emission reductions at Paris, only seventeen have passed laws to do so. These include Japan and Canada, but also Tonga, Samoa, and North Macedonia. Every major industrial nation has failed to live up to its pledge at Paris. Of the two hundred nations at Glasgow that affirmed their commitment to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees Celsius, virtually none have policies in place to meet that goal. The IPCC warns that to reach this threshold, carbon emissions will have to be reduced by half by 2030. And yet, as UN Secretary-General Guterres has acknowledged, global emissions by the end of the decade are, in fact, expected to increase by 14 percent. In 2022, seven years after the Paris Agreement, global fossil fuel emissions reached 36.6 billion tons, a record high.
Not only are nation-states failing to honor their pledges, they are also underreporting their emissions. A 2022 report from the International Energy Agency suggests that methane emissions alone are 70 percent higher than governments acknowledge. In 2016, Malaysia released 422 million tons of greenhouse gases and yet claimed just 81 million. Forty-five countries have not submitted any figures since 2009. Algeria, a major oil and gas producer, last reported in 2000. The carbon tally has never included the oil fields of Russia and the Middle East or the nation of Libya. According to the UN, unreported global emissions add up to some 13.3 billion tons, equivalent to China’s total output.
Although countries may make pledges, all that matters is implementation. But implementation, given the costs, is a formidable political challenge even with a level playing field. Certainly the twenty nations that generate 80 percent of carbon emissions need to be held accountable. Someone living in Wyoming has a carbon footprint a thousand times that of an Ethiopian. Still, to ask Americans, Canadians, Germans, or the Dutch to unilaterally move toward carbon neutrality simply because it is the right thing to do is politically a nonstarter.
And even were such nations to take the high road, setting a moral example for the rest of the world, their sacrifices would yield only modest returns. If the U.S., currently the source of 13 percent of global emissions, achieved net zero, the consequence would be a global temperature reduction of but 0.2 degrees Celsius. And even this modest success would be negated by a decade of emission increases elsewhere.
No action by the United States, Canada, or the European Union is going to stop developing nations from using fossil fuels. Nigeria, for example, has a rapidly growing population of 200 million with a per capita income one-twelfth that of the U.S. Expecting a country that depends on oil and gas for 70 percent of its budget, and 40 percent of GDP, to forgo increases in emissions to satisfy a global carbon-free agenda crafted by the wealthy of the world, former colonial powers all, is less than realistic.
The unilateral pursuit of a carbon-free future by a select number of Western nations acting in isolation can, in fact, have profound geopolitical consequences, as Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine has shown. To the extent that it reduced oil and gas production in North America and Europe, the push for net zero delivered a financial windfall to Vladimir Putin, allowing Russia to accumulate capital reserves to both finance his war and insulate his regime, to the extent possible, from international sanctions. As European nations embraced net zero, shuttering coal-fired power plants, their dependence on Russian natural gas only increased, just as Putin had anticipated.
Putin clearly views the climate crisis not as a planetary emergency but rather as a geopolitical opportunity for an autocratic regime that depends on oil and gas for 40 percent of its revenues and 60 percent of its exports. Europe produces 3.6 million barrels of oil a day but consumes 15 million. Each year, it produces 230 billion cubic meters of natural gas but uses 560 billion cubic meters, 425 million tons of coal but consumes some 950 million tons.
Russia, by contrast, before the invasion, produced 11 million barrels of oil a day but consumed just 3.4 million barrels, 700 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year but used 400 billion, 800 million tons of coal while consuming just 300 million tons. Russia provided Europe with 27 percent of its oil, and since 2016, its share of the natural gas market had increased from 30 to 45 percent, nearly half of Europe’s total consumption. Germany was even more exposed, relying on Russia for 55 percent of its natural gas.
Increasing Europe’s energy dependency has long been at the core of Putin’s geopolitical strategy, his strongest point of leverage as the autocratic leader of a paper tiger—Upper Volta with nuclear weapons, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once described the Soviet Union—today a nation with an economy smaller than that of Texas.
While the European Union earnestly pursued a carbonfree future, Putin doubled down on fossil fuels, all with the goal of dominating Europe’s energy supply. As Germany shut down nuclear power plants, closed gas fields, and curbed or shuttered fracking and coal operations, Russia expanded in all energy sectors, prioritizing nuclear for domestic consumption, allowing for larger natural gas exports to Europe, and securing with every increase in market share ever greater dependence on the part of NATO members. “While we banned plastic straws,” quips Michael Shellenberger, “Russia drilled and doubled nuclear energy production.”
Russia did not simply watch as the climate movement in Europe and North America rejected both the nuclear option and fracking; it actively supported these campaigns, working behind the scenes against shale gas, in particular. Anders Fogh Rasmussen notes that during his tenure as secretary-general of NATO (2009 to 2014), the Russians “engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations—environmental organisations working against shale gas—to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas.”
The Centre for European Studies, as reported by Matt Ridley, estimates that the Russian government invested some $95 million to support and empower NGOs campaigning against coalbed methane projects. Russia’s goal over more than a decade was to impede U.S. natural gas production lest its soaring supply, made possible by fracking, affect global energy markets, erode the profitability of Russian operations, and reduce European dependence on Russian sources.
Leveraging power through energy lies at the heart of Putin’s diplomatic agenda, be it in the halls of a UN climate conference or in the blood-soaked streets of Ukraine’s broken cities. Western sanctions aside, in the first months of the war, European nations continued to purchase Russian energy, transferring roughly $1 billion a day in payments for oil and natural gas, funding the very invasion their political leaders diplomatically denounced. Sanctions intended to drive down the value of the ruble, conceived to bring the war home to the Russian people, were countered by Putin’s insistence that energy purchases be denominated in rubles; every barrel of oil or volume of gas bought by the West not only paid for the war but also propped up the Russian currency.
According to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, Russian revenues from fossil fuel exports to the European Union soared to $46.3 billion during the first two months of the Ukraine invasion. This was more than double the value of Russian energy imported by the EU during the same two-month period a year earlier. The instability created by Putin’s war drove up oil prices, allowing Russia to make twice as much money from the same amount of oil.
While Putin has been weaponizing oil and natural gas, the focus of U.S. energy policy has been on carbon reduction, embraced to a myopic extent. With Russian forces poised to assault a free and independent nation, John Kerry, presidential climate envoy under Biden, secretary of state during the Obama administration, expressed his singular concern that a Russian invasion “could have a profound negative impact on the climate, obviously. You have a war, and obviously you’re going to have massive emissions consequences to the war. But equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus.” Given the agonies of the Ukrainian people, it is hard to recall a more wooden statement from a senior American diplomat.
Rather than chastising the world for losing its focus, Kerry would do well to acknowledge, as he surely knows, that not all nations play by the same rules and that the climate crisis is not the only challenge that confronts an everchanging and always perilous world. Lenin, a man much admired by Putin, his namesake, wrote that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. Ukraine surely is such an inflection point. As one observer has bitterly remarked, the Russian assault—deliberate, cynical, bloody, and brutal—may finally oblige “the free world to grow up and stop treating energy policy like a middle school project.”
“Geopolitical realism and energy realism go hand in hand,” notes Derek Burney, Canada’s former ambassador in Washington. The goal of reaching net-zero emissions by the end of this decade or even the next, he adds, is simply not going to happen. U.S. emissions peaked in 2007 and have since declined, largely because of the rise of wind power and the success of fracking and the replacement of coal with natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide, as an energy source. A shift from one fossil fuel to a more efficient one hardly implies the end of the carbon age. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, oil and gas will remain the country’s largest source of energy in 2050 and well beyond.
China’s emissions since 2000 have tripled. India has pledged a “phase down” of coal as a proportion of its energy profile, but in absolute terms coal production is expected to soar as the economy expands. The government production target for 2024 alone is one billion tons, up from 700 million the previous year. Coal generates 80 percent of India’s electricity, a figure that has not changed in a decade, and 60 percent of China’s. In 2040, China is expected to still be reliant on carbon for 76 percent of its energy needs. China’s very capacity to endure as a nation-state is based on a social contract that has its citizens forgoing political freedom in exchange for prosperity and domestic stability; under the current regime, economy—and hence energy—will always trump the environment. In 2022 alone, the Chinese government issued permits for 168 new coal-fired power plants.
Despite being the greatest emitter of greenhouse gases with the second largest economy in the world, China continues to self-identify as a developing nation, even as it demands that the “rich” nations transfer hundreds of millions each year to help “poor” nations combat climate change. UN secretary-general António Guterres has repeatedly called upon the G20, source of 80 percent of carbon emissions, to provide the developing world with $100 billion a year. If such multilateral schemes become operational, rivers of cash will flow as often as not into the coffers of kleptocracies. What will become of cash transfers intended to assist Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Myanmar, Somalia, or Haiti to move to a carbon-free future?
Failed states, however corrupt or dystopic their regimes, remain the homelands of millions of good and decent people, living in conditions that leave little doubt that, heretical as it may be to say, climate is not our only global problem. Every year, four million people die of malnutrition, three million from AIDS, two million from a lack of potable water. Malaria infects over a billion, killing a million each year. The UN World Food Programme estimates that every year 690 million people go hungry; 45 million are threatened by famine. There are 82 million refugees and 50 million internally displaced by poverty or conflict.
Many see the climate crisis as a supreme moment that can bring us together, giving us, as Al Gore notes, “the moral capacity to take on related challenges.” Others suggest that if we squander resources chasing the holy grail of climate, these challenges will not be met, and the political fallout will, if anything, further tear us apart. If fully implemented, the Paris Agreement would commit the world to spending between $1 trillion and $2 trillion a year, all with the goal of achieving by 2100 a temperature change best described as modest. The cost of lifting every man, woman, and child out of extreme poverty is said to be $100 billion. To put this in perspective, just one month’s worth of the resources dedicated to climate by the terms of the Paris Agreement would be sufficient to eliminate extreme poverty in the world.
In the end, it comes down to two closely related questions. Do we consider climate change an imminent threat to civilization, with the fate of life on Earth hanging in the balance? Or, alternatively, do we see it as a serious and daunting challenge that must and will be addressed, one of many that will confront us over the coming century?
If the answer to the first question is yes, then we really are in trouble. History does not inspire confidence that the global community can act as one, if this, indeed, is what the crisis demands, as activists maintain. Given the record of inaction to date, we can only hope that the most dire forecasts will prove to be unfounded and that through innovation, mitigation, and adaptation, humans will find a path forward, even as the world changes around us, as it has always done.
In the meantime, a climate movement that invokes the apocalyptic even while setting targets that no nation or corporation has the ability or intention to meet may do more harm than good, leaving people numb with helplessness and existential despair, dissipating the very political will necessary to actually achieve the transformation that the crisis demands.
There is a middle way, one that calls for sensible and open dialogue, with the goal not just of reducing carbon emissions but of improving the well-being of all people and the natural environments in which they live. Every day around the world some 3,700 people die in car accidents, all told 1.35 million each year, a horrific loss. Reducing the speed limit to 10 miles per hour would solve the problem, but it will never happen, as the economic and personal costs would be too high. So we aim for a balance, a speed limit we can live with, literally, but not so low as to paralyze a society dependent on mobility. Climate activists who demand an immediate end to carbon emissions are as advocates of a 10-mile-per-hour speed limit, which is why their rhetoric fails to register, leaving their goals unrealized. Polemics and fear will never move people to action. Hope and the promise of a better life in a better world will.
We cannot bury the economy and expect to have the capacity to address the problem or exploit the opportunity. The way to address climate change is to unleash the free market to increase prosperity and innovation, while resisting policies that will have the opposite effect. Rather than exhaust money, resources, and political capital on quixotic attempts to meet arbitrary if not impossible goals—for example, the elimination of all emissions by a fixed date—let’s invest in solutions: smart market-based carbon taxes and R & D investments in energy storage, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, geoengineering, and algae that convert carbon dioxide to produce oil that when burned will be, by definition, a net-zero emitter of carbon. What we need are tools that will allow us to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, not regulations and restrictions that will legislate behavior, restrain growth, and hamper competition just when we need the best minds of the world to be more inventive, vibrant, entrepreneurial, and inspired than at any other time in the long history of our species.
The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones. Kerosene displaced whale oil, and just in time. Fears that London and New York would be rendered uninhabitable by horse dung faded with the automobile. The poisonous smog over the city of Los Angeles was eliminated not by a ban on traffic but through the invention of the catalytic converter. A population explosion in India did not result in famine; the nation today produces four times as much grain as it did in When the price of green energy drops below that of fossil fuels, the age of carbon will end.
We can hasten the process by eliminating the hidden subsidies for fossil fuels, which, according to a recent report from the IMF, have surged to $7 trillion, 7.2 percent of global GDP. Governments worldwide spend more money propping up oil, coal, and natural gas than they budget for education (4.3 percent of global GDP) and close to two-thirds of what they devote to health care (10.9 percent).
We can demand oversight and efficiency. Every year, through negligence and shoddy extractive practices, fossil fuel operations around the world release to the atmosphereas much natural gas as Europe burns for power. Such leakage is both shameful and readily staunched.
In 2018, Chad Frischmann of Project Drawdown gave a compelling TED Talk in which he referenced the one hundred top solutions to the climate crisis, as determined by his organization after months of study. The list was an exhilarating cascade of the unexpected, each proposal worthy of implementation even in the absence of a climate threat. Replacing hydrofluorocarbons, for example, with natural refrigerants, readily available today, would alone eliminate gigatons of greenhouse gases.
In a hungry world, fully a third of all food is not eaten. In poorer nations, the waste occurs in the supply chain, rarely in the home. Among the wealthy, the wastage is at the table. In the U.S. alone, 40 percent of all food, 108 billion pounds, the equivalent of 130 billion meals, with a value of $408 billion, is thrown away each year. Much of it ends up in landfills, where it emits methane gas as it decomposes. Food waste is responsible for 8 percent of greenhouse gases.
Critically, as Frischmann makes clear, the solutions for humanity’s chronic needs serve equally to reduce the threat of global warming. If we address the problems of hunger and food security, including storage, infrastructure, and wastage, carbon emissions will dramatically decline. If womenare provided with safe and effective contraceptives, allowing them to control their lives and free their potential, they will have fewer children, reducing the carbon footprint of their families. Asked to identify the single most powerful tool in reversing the long-term impact of global warming, Frischmann, without hesitation, named family planning and the education of women.
Those who insist that only by reaching net zero will we be able to turn to other problems fail to grasp that it is only by addressing such problems that we have a realistic chance of achieving carbon neutrality. Those living in extreme poverty today can hardly be expected to care about an abstract threat that awaits in the future. To make the world more prosperous and secure, we must invest in education, technology, and health care. Free trade, including support for communities adversely affected by it; childhood nutrition; the eradication of malaria, tuberculosis, and polio; and universal access to immunization, not to mention family planning and free access to contraceptives—all such efforts are today underfunded in a world where fully one-quarter of international aid goes to climate projects.
If the goal is not just to reduce emissions but to remove carbon from the atmosphere, our best course of action is to conserve and enhance the natural systems—forests and grasslands, kelp beds, peat bogs and heaths—that draw carbon dioxide from the air, sequestering carbon through the miracle of photosynthesis. Climate activists would do well to avoid the next UN Climate Change Conference and focus instead on protecting the environments where they live.
Wetlands annually capture 6.7 million tons of greenhouse gases; two million acres disappear each year. Mangroves, sea grasses, and salt marshes covering less than 1 percent of the Earth’s land surface account for 50 percent of all carbon sequestered in marine sediments. We have lost 50 percent of mangroves since 1980. The boreal forests that cover much of northern Canada, Alaska, Russia, and Scandinavia sequester carbon at twice the rate of tropical forests; collectively, they comprise the greatest carbon sink on the planet. And yet, from Siberia to Saskatchewan, they are being logged on an industrial scale for pulp, in Canada largely for the production of two-ply toilet paper.
A carbon-free energy grid won’t realize its promise if the clean power is used to maintain or extend patterns of consumption that lay waste to the natural world. The city of Vancouver, where I live, has with great fanfare vowed to reach net zero by 2030, even as the province of British Columbia conspires with the logging industry to produce annually 65 million cubic meters of timber, destroying each year half a million acres of forested land. Meanwhile, across central Europe, ancient forests are being ground into sawdust to form pellets marketed as wood waste and sold as a source of green energy, allowing prosperous countries in western Europe to fulfill their commitments to renewable power. Wood, which can be as dirty as coal when burned, is Europe’s largest “renewable” energy source, well ahead of wind and solar.
By some estimates, nature-based solutions have the capacity to absorb as much carbon as is generated each year through the burning of fossil fuels. Swiss researchers have calculated that more than 3.7 million square miles of land, an area the size of the United States, could be reforested without disrupting either urban growth or agricultural production. A trillion trees planted at a cost of $300 billion would absorb, according to one estimate, two-thirds of the greenhouse gases that humans have added to the atmosphere. A quixotic goal perhaps, but not unachievable. Australia has pledged to plant a billion trees by 2030; Pakistan, ten billion within a generation. Since the 1970s, China has planted fifty billion trees. And yet, in the confusion and contradictions of global climate policy, a mere 2.5 percent of funding spent on mitigating climate change goes to such proven and potent nature-based solutions.
On my last day in Copenhagen in 2009, Carter Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund (U.S.), summed up the situation. There were, he suggested, only four possible outcomes. If the scientists were wrong and we did nothing, little would change. If they were wrong and we nevertheless acted to mitigate the risks, the worst that could happen would be a transformation that would result in a cleaner environment, a more technologically integrated world, and a healthier planet.
If the scientists were right and we did nothing, the potential consequences would be at best bad and at worst catastrophic. If the scientific consensus held and we aggressively marshalled our financial resources and technological capacity to confront the climate crisis, we would be able to head off potential disaster and make for a better world. It was difficult to conjure a losing scenario, save that of inaction.
But to act in a manner that is meaningful, effective, and truly transformative, we need a language not of desperation and doom but of confidence and determination. On a mission to save the planet, pessimism is an indulgence, orthodoxy the enemy of invention, despair an insult to the imagination. The global energy grid will be transformed, if not in our lifetime then certainly in that of our grandchildren. The impetus and motivation will be hope, not fear; the agent of change, our human ingenuity—the adaptive capacity to innovate and invent that has always allowed our species to thrive.

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