America’s Carbon Bill Is Coming Due
Saved by Diego Segura and
Climate change is costing us dearly, and it’s only getting worse. I feel so intensely frustrated, largely because the preventative actions we could have taken were not mysterious to us: invest in renewables, transition from greenhouse gas-emitting energy generation, and put a price on carbon. We’re finally making some progress on green energy, thanks to advances in wind and solar and battery technology. But for decades, the fossil fuel industry and our captive politicians cynically and speciously argued that the economy should come first. News flash: We’re going to pay more for the cleanup than it would have cost to prevent these disasters in the first place.
Saved by Diego Segura and
Bill McKibben has put some very precise numbers on our remaining carbon budget. You’re saying we’re going to need to safeguard some portion of that budget for some of these critical transitional steps? Gopal: We need to be very smart about how we use our carbon budget. We should absolutely not be expending any fossil energy exploring for more fossi
... See moreCarbon fundamentalism is another form of denial. Energy obviously matters; it’s an absolutely strategic point of intervention for shifting us to a more just society, but when people talk about renewable energy and clean energy as if the only thing that matters is reducing carbon emissions and it doesn’t matter how we get there. We say, No, it’s not
... See moreThe climate crisis isn’t a matter of intelligence—an average eighth-grader can understand what our carbon emissions are doing to the atmosphere. What makes the crisis so daunting is that it can be understood in a variety of ways: as a failure of global governance, a failure to properly price carbon emissions, a contest between rich nations and poor
... See moreIts relentless trajectory: To bring it on, all we have to do is, um, nothing. Its overwhelming complexity: To fix it, not only do we have to do something, but, as Naomi Klein has said, we pretty much have to “change everything” about how our economy and society operates. Its asymmetries of power: Those of us most historically responsible for causin
... See moreDealing with this challenge will, for the first time in history, require a truly global, as well as a very substantial and prolonged, commitment. To conclude that we will be able to achieve decarbonization anytime soon, effectively and on the required scales, runs against all past evidence. The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992, and
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