A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

So John Kerry gave a pretty awful interview over the weekend. You have to wonder why he bothered agreeing to speak with the BBC’s Andrew Marr if he intended just to dodge questions. Marr asked Kerry, in his capacity as U.S. climate envoy, whether the United States intended to shut down coal-fired power plants and would commit to a timeline, and whether Americans ought to reduce energy consumption and eat less meat.

Kerry’s answers were consistently evasive and occasionally downright nutty—like when he said that “50 percent of the reductions we have to make to get to net-zero […] are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have.” You can read Jan Dutkiewicz’s deconstruction of Kerry’s equally disturbing answer to the meat question, which included the illuminating sentence, “Cattle are herded and fed.”

The problem, as Jan writes, is that most of the so-called “solutions” to reducing emissions from meat production—feeding cows seaweed or using natural grazing techniques—don’t actually solve the problem at the scale required. In reality, we have the technology we need to reduce meat emissions: It’s called eating less meat. (Not necessarily no meat, if you’re attached to it. But vastly less per day than many Americans are used to.)

This message—that we already have the tools we need, we just need to stop screwing around—was emphasized yesterday by a new report from the International Energy Agency. The intergovernmental organization is hardly a bunch of tree-hugging radicals, having been established originally by Henry Kissinger. But as TNR’s Kate Aronoff reported, the main conclusion of its 227-page report was one that American politicians, including those left of center, aren’t ready to talk about yet: We need to stop approving new fossil fuel projects. No new pipelines. No new drills in the ground. To cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the IEA proposes cutting oil investments roughly in half over the next decade, compared to 2011–2020. Here’s what that looks like, according to Kate:

Oil demand under the IEA’s net-zero scenario would decline 75 percent, and “unabated” gas—burned in plants not fitted with some kind of carbon-scrubbing device—would decline by 88 percent through 2050, along with 98 percent of unabated coal use. The remaining roughly one-fifth of fossil fuel usage by 2050 would largely power heavy and hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel, with solar and wind meeting 70 percent of energy demand. Renewables overall would increase by well over 700 percent. No internal combustion vehicles would be sold anywhere on earth by 2035, at which point wealthy economies will have power sectors run on clean energy.

That is a heck of a lot more ambitious than anything the Biden administration has proposed. “Even the text of the Green New Deal resolution—that favorite bugbear of today’s conservatives, who love to portray it as some kind of mad eco-communism—doesn’t actually mention fossil fuels or plans to phase them out directly,” Kate noted.

And yet, here’s the IEA saying, in a very practical and nonideological way, that this is the clear path forward. If you read between the lines, it’s saying it’s time to stop screwing around.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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