A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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On Tuesday, the World Economic Forum named “climate action failure” the top risk to global security in a new report. This came in the midst of NATO negotiations with Russia counterparts in Geneva, with American security experts laser-focused on fending off a conflict over Ukraine. For those who don’t remember, the World Economic Forum, or WEF, is most famous for hosting a lavish annual affair in Davos, Switzerland, attended by billionaire CEOs, heads of state, Cabinet ministers, and enough private planes to reenact the Battle of Britain. (WEF has made noises about offsetting emissions and increasing sustainability measures, but consider this your weekly reminder that offsets remain something of an accounting fiction.) So, as usual when it comes to WEF climate declarations, you could cut the irony of its most recent announcement with a mother-of-pearl caviar spoon. Nevertheless, they’re right: Inaction on climate change probably is the top global security risk of our time. The consequences of failing to curb emissions include severe weather, crop failure, population displacement, ecosystem collapse, extreme heat, increased conflict, and more. Many of these consequences are already here—although they’ll get much, much worse without intervention. So why is the Biden administration treating climate change as a second- or third-order concern? Kate Aronoff’s new piece, published this morning, looks at the White House’s doublespeak on this issue. To be sure, Senator Joe Manchin is to blame for blocking some of the White House’s planned climate spending. Yet at the same time, as Kate points out, the Biden administration is prioritizing exporting American gas to Europe and developing new natural gas infrastructure there, even though the International Energy Agency has said we need to halt all new fossil fuel infrastructure in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Biden administration officials have justified building out this new fossil fuel infrastructure as a way of counteracting Russian influence in Europe—the same influence they’re eager to curb in Ukraine. They’ve also claimed that gas is a “clean” energy, even though, as Kate underscores, methane leaks from natural gas probably cancel out the emissions benefit of switching from coal to gas. |
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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}} Prioritizing last-generation security interests like fighting Russia over climate change feels particularly discordant in the same week when unchecked climate change is named the top global security threat. But it’s also at odds with American public opinion, according to a new study.
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication released a new report today that finds a record proportion of Americans can be categorized as “alarmed” about climate change—the highest category of worry on a spectrum that includes “concerned,” “cautious,” “disengaged,” “doubtful,” or “dismissive.” In the latest survey, “the Alarmed (33%) outnumber the Dismissive (9%) by more than 3 to 1. About six in ten Americans (59%) are either Alarmed or Concerned, while only about 2 in 10 (19%) are Doubtful or Dismissive.” This is a marked shift: In the 2015 survey, “alarmed,” now the largest single group, was the second smallest.
The people in the middle—the 42 percent who are either “concerned” or “cautious”—displayed some things in common, the authors wrote. They seem not to “fully understand the threat of climate impacts or the urgency of climate action, despite the fact that global warming is already harming communities across America.”
This seeming disconnect between concern and action lines up, in some ways, with the one Kate observes in the Biden administration’s actions right now: It’s possible for people to be worried about something and yet not understand how imminent and urgent that threat is. Still, it’s not necessarily clear that the Biden administration, which made a big show of its climate commitments on the campaign trail and in the past year, should be calibrating its policies to that concerned and/or cautious 42 percent. The authors of today’s report write that its surveys have shown “strong public support—across party lines—for a variety of climate policies.”
Even if support for climate action is fractured by our current political system, that doesn’t close off all options. There’s a good case, for example, for doubling down on a public information campaign to help that 42 percent understand the urgency and build even bigger support for robust climate policy. Persuasion can work! And people who are concerned or cautious, rather than dismissive, are probably a good group to target in those efforts.
“Like many before it,” Kate writes in her piece, “the Biden administration has had to decide what constitutes a crisis worthy of exceptional action.” Right now, high gas prices and geopolitics are being treated as such, whereas the threat of climate change doesn’t seem to be. The WEF and Yale reports this week, however, offer the administration some reasons to reexamine those priorities. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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The amount that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2021, rebounding strongly from their early pandemic slump. |
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The Biden administration today announced a massive offshore wind lease sale off the coasts of New York and New Jersey, alongside a $20 billion initiative from the Energy Department to green the electrical grid. |
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Having reviewed the matter, the world’s largest P.R. firm has decided to keep working with fossil fuel clients. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of a case the Supreme Court is hearing next month. It’s a thorough and clear explanation of the tricky legal issues in play, but here’s the bottom line: |
At the center of the consolidated case is the question of whose interpretation of the E.P.A.’s authority under Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act is correct: the Obama Administration’s or Trump’s—or, if you prefer, blue states’ attorneys generals’ or red states’. But the case, which has attracted amicus briefs from a Death Star’s worth of right-wing think tanks, could become the start of something much bigger. Vickie Patton, the general counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the many respondents in the case, said that the petitioners are “asking the Court to do far-reaching damage to all sorts of ways we protect human life: by regulating food safety, car safety, deadly pollution, and so on.” She added, “There’s an enormous amount at stake for the American people.” |
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What Subscribers Are Reading |
We’re getting Covid-19 severity all wrong. |
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Biden’s crackdown on Big Meat aims to increase competition to bring prices down. But cheap meat depends on ignoring the product’s true cost. |
by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg |
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