![]() The US itself has, of course, made a huge U-turn with a presidency that has begun by undoing much of what the previous administration did, reregulating what was deregulated, restarting support for research, and rejoining the Paris climate accords. We have crossed barriers that seemed insurmountable at the end of the last millennium ![]() They do not get us to where we need to be, but they lay the foundation for further shifts, and like the Green New Deal many of them seemed unlikely a few years ago. A lot of these policies have been deemed both good and not good enough. In April, oil-rich California made a commitment to end fossil fuel extraction altogether – if by a too-generous deadline. They include, recently, the UK committing to end overseas fossil fuel finance in December, the EU in January deciding to “discourage all further investments into fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure projects in third countries”, and the US making a less comprehensive but meaningful effort this spring to curtail funding for overseas extraction. You have to be a policy nerd to keep track of the countless new initiatives around the world. It’s not easy to see all the changes – you have to be a wonk to follow the details on new battery storage solutions or the growth of solar power in cheapness, proliferation, efficiency and possibility, or new understanding about agriculture and soil management to enhance carbon sequestration. For example, ideas put forth in the Green New Deal in 2019, seen as radical at the time, are now the kind of stuff President Biden routinely proposes in his infrastructure and jobs plans. But the technological solutions and the success of the organizing to address this largest of all crises have likewise grown by leaps and bounds. ![]() The science mostly gives us terrifying news of more melting, more storms, more droughts, more fires, more famines. Three things matter for climate chaos and our response to it – the science reporting on current and potential conditions, the technology offering solutions, and the organizing which is shifting perspectives and policy. Where we are now would have seemed like science fiction itself 20 years ago where we need to be will take us deeper into that territory. T hat we are living in science fiction was brought home to me last week when I put down Kim Stanley Robinson’s superb climate-futures novel The Ministry for the Future and picked up Bill McKibben’s New Yorker letter on climate, warning of the melting of the Thwaites Glacier, “already known as the ‘doomsday glacier’ because its collapse could raise global sea levels by as much as three feet”.
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