World leaders (with the notable exception of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and a pouting Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan) are meeting for another climate summit to determine what to do about the upcoming end of the world as we know it. Humanity's chance to dodge a catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius of global warming are fading, and already we are seeing the results of the changing climate in the form of new megadroughts, stronger storms, shifting ocean currents, rising tides, and extreme fires. Beyond 2 degrees lies the apocalyptic stuff, in which Antarctic and Greenlandic ice sheets collapse into the oceans, large regions of the world become wastelands as the climate shifts more rapidly than evolution can, in the short term, account for, and we can kiss most of the Atlantic and Gulf Coast cities goodbye.
This is all extremely bad, the science is now so nailed down that all but the most recalcitrant or corrupt of world leaders cannot dodge it, and the premise remains the same: Every nation needs to wean itself from fossil fuels, and immediately. This is what world leaders are once again talking about today at COP26: how to get from here to non-apocalypse.
In what amounts to good news, the new Biden administration is flooding the zone with American officials, both career and appointed, and is both promising the United States will do its part and that it will put $3 billion per year toward helping developing countries transition as well. This is especially notable because his predecessor was a flaming garbage fire in a suit, had no patience for or even basic understanding of any of this, and appointed cronies who spent four years trying to sabotage not just our national preparedness plans, but any mention of the changing climate at all.
But it also shows the tenuousness of American, and world, efforts. Each nation can make all the promises it wants, and heaven knows many have been doing so, but so long as there is some corrupt kleptocrat or self-interested petro-state official who calculates that sabotaging what they can will bring them big enough cash to make the end of the world worth it, it can be undone as well. Republicanism has adopted illiteracy as a moral code—there is little to no chance any future Republican administration will abide restrictions on fossil fuels, just as the Senate's own Democratic mini-coal-baron, Joe Manchin, single-handedly strips any climate-based considerations that might make his "blind trust" coal-pushing slightly less lucrative than it otherwise might be.
It is very difficult to feel optimistic about this new climate summit, simply because even though world leaders do finally appear to grasp the we-are-boned urgency of at least not chugging blithely toward rendering parts of the planet no longer tolerable for human life, we have also been here before. That leaders have to be regaled by the same phalanx of famous names urging them to rise to the challenge of sucking less may be a necessary part of the pageantry, but contributes to the ongoing impression that world leaders have spent a half-century in such meetings and are still working on being convinced to care.
So let's put a call out: reasons for optimism. Go. Tell us what you got.
This is all extremely bad, the science is now so nailed down that all but the most recalcitrant or corrupt of world leaders cannot dodge it, and the premise remains the same: Every nation needs to wean itself from fossil fuels, and immediately. This is what world leaders are once again talking about today at COP26: how to get from here to non-apocalypse.
In what amounts to good news, the new Biden administration is flooding the zone with American officials, both career and appointed, and is both promising the United States will do its part and that it will put $3 billion per year toward helping developing countries transition as well. This is especially notable because his predecessor was a flaming garbage fire in a suit, had no patience for or even basic understanding of any of this, and appointed cronies who spent four years trying to sabotage not just our national preparedness plans, but any mention of the changing climate at all.
But it also shows the tenuousness of American, and world, efforts. Each nation can make all the promises it wants, and heaven knows many have been doing so, but so long as there is some corrupt kleptocrat or self-interested petro-state official who calculates that sabotaging what they can will bring them big enough cash to make the end of the world worth it, it can be undone as well. Republicanism has adopted illiteracy as a moral code—there is little to no chance any future Republican administration will abide restrictions on fossil fuels, just as the Senate's own Democratic mini-coal-baron, Joe Manchin, single-handedly strips any climate-based considerations that might make his "blind trust" coal-pushing slightly less lucrative than it otherwise might be.
It is very difficult to feel optimistic about this new climate summit, simply because even though world leaders do finally appear to grasp the we-are-boned urgency of at least not chugging blithely toward rendering parts of the planet no longer tolerable for human life, we have also been here before. That leaders have to be regaled by the same phalanx of famous names urging them to rise to the challenge of sucking less may be a necessary part of the pageantry, but contributes to the ongoing impression that world leaders have spent a half-century in such meetings and are still working on being convinced to care.
So let's put a call out: reasons for optimism. Go. Tell us what you got.