Last Sunday was Earth Day, marked by events in San Diego and across the world meant to underscore the appreciation that humans must be good shepherds of a fragile planet. But the problem for humans, for the planet, is that the arc of the climate emergency remains terrifying.
Yes, more people than ever are doing their part to limit their climate impacts. And, yes, there is real resolve across the planet to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are making Earth warmer, dryer and more subject to extreme events. But according to an authoritative recent report, such global emissions continue to go up, reaching a record high in 2023 of 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon pollution. China’s fossil fuel emissions went up 458 million metric tons — more than all the reductions in the U.S. and Europe combined — while India’s went up 233 million metric tons. The two nations’ leaders may say the right things, but they also know that the rapid, pollution-fueled growth of their economies in recent decades has lifted hundreds of millions of their residents out of poverty. It’s tough for those in long-affluent nations to lecture China and India when their own nations spent centuries burning coal and oil to build their own economies — and, in doing so, laid the groundwork for the current emergency.
But this is the not the only threat to the global strategy of forcing a shift to cleaner sources of energy. For all the great news about the cost of solar and wind power plunging as production ramps up, policies that require this energy transition in many Western nations inevitably take a toll on the pocketbooks of many citizens — at a time when the fallout from inflation is already at a 30-year high. The result, as The Economist reported in October, is an accelerating global backlash.
This is why prestigious scientific associations in the United Kingdom and the U.S. have long ed research into supplementing emission-reduction policies with bold geoengineering initiatives. But some scientists urge caution — and environmentalists are often fervent opponents. Between considerable public resistance to a climate emergency response that requires personal sacrifices and many greens’ belief that this response that should require penance and sacrifices, it’s hard to be optimistic about achieving genuine progress.
Eight years after nearly every nation on Earth ratified the Paris Agreement, the broad belief that the climate emergency is an existential threat is not accompanied by the urgency one would expect in responding to that threat. The reasons for this conundrum are many and complex — and they’re not going away.
