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“It’s a project for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,” said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who’s now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”

The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest

. The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.

So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat ofwaldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.

I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.

energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”

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Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.

Chernobyl was a watershed.

The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”

It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.

The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes.

In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.

Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years

Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some

The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.

Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market.

Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.

“Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”

Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.

Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.

The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.

“The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”

All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though

For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least.

here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.

At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide

Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.

“The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”

In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.

Biden has pledged to make the U.S. power sector 100% carbon-pollution free by 2035.

Thursday's summit did not detail how the White House plans to achieve the 50% reduction in emissions.

is nearly double the target set by Obama administration in 2015.

A second administration official said the White House expects other world leaders to follow Biden's announcement

But Biden's climate change agenda faces obstacles at home and abroad.

"The U.S. chose to come and go as it likes with regard to the Paris Agreement,"

"how it plans to make up for the lost four years."

The United States is the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), producing about 5.41 billion metric tons in 2018.

China emits nearly twice that amount.

Experts say the world's major economies need to dramatically scale back their carbon emissions to limit the rise of average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsiu

Biden has pledged to be the most aggressive president on climate chang

"The Biden-Harris administration will do more than any in history to meet our climate crisis,"

But Biden's steps so far, and his promise to do more, have already unleashed a torrent of criticism from Republicans who argue that his climate policies will hurt American businesse

"It’s difficult to imagine the United States winning the long-term strategic competition with China if we cannot lead the renewable energy revolution

Sea level rise is going to be an ongoing problem for centuries to come, we will have to keep on adapting over and over again. It’s going to be a whole new expensive lifestyle, costing trillions of dollars.

Sea level has a very long memory, so even if we start cooling temperatures the seas will continue to rise.

About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters – the US, China, India, Russia and the European Union – according to the researchers. The US was a key architect of the Paris deal but this week Donald Trump formally triggered its exit from the agreement.

Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimetres is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we’ve observed over the entire 20th century,

The results reveal the daunting prospect of a near-endless advance of the seas, forcing countries to invest huge resources in defending key infrastructure or ceding certain areas to the tides. Many coastal cities around the world are already facing this challenge, with recent research finding that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 unless carbon emissions are drastically slashed.

the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed.

“People are going to become less inclined to live by the coast and there are going to be sea level rise refugees,” Clark said. “More severe cuts in emissions are certainly going to be required but the current Paris pledges aren’t enough to prevent the seas from rising for a long, long time.”

Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.

The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?

“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects

But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.

The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”

it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.

“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”

Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.

“It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life

how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.

It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change

The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.

Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.

For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”

“There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”

“we’re all in this together.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.

every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.

It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels

Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.

“Seriously, it is not reversible.”

First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”

Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.

If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.

If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.

The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.

“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt

“But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.

“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”

“I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”

adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one

Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.

“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”

It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”

And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.

Cascading Disasters

Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.

Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.

If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.

as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.

Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.

One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves

A Lifetime of Clues

For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.

As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,

“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”

ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.

“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”

“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”

The researchers identified a common set of drastic changes that the United States would need to make over the next decade to stay on pace for zero emissions.

This year, energy companies will install 42 gigawatts of new wind turbines and solar panels, smashing records. But that annual pace would need to nearly double over the next decade

The capacity of the nation’s electric grid would have to expand roughly 60 percent by 2030 to handle vast amounts of wind and solar power

By 2030, at least 50 percent of new cars sold would need to be battery-powered, with that share rising thereafter.

Most homes today are heated by natural gas or oil. But in the next 10 years, nearly one-quarter would need to be warmed with efficient electric heat pumps, double today’s numbers.

Virtually all of the 200 remaining coal-burning power plants would have to shut down by 2030.

“The scale of what we have to build in a very short time frame surprised me,” said Christopher Greig, a senior scientist at Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

To start, the United States could make enormous strides over the next decade by rapidly scaling up solutions already in use today, like wind, solar, electric cars and heat pumps. Doing so would require $2.5 trillion in additional investments by governments and industry by 2030.

Wind and solar power could be backed up by batteries, some existing nuclear reactors and a large fleet of natural-gas plants that run only occasionally or have been modified to burn clean hydrogen.

Devices that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could help offset emissions.

But most of those technologies are still in early development. That would have to change quickly.

“We need to be building up our options now,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton.

The studies found that, if done right, getting to net zero appears broadly affordable, largely because technologies like wind and solar have become so much cheaper than anyone expected over the past decade.

“It’s not a question of whether we have enough land, because we do,” said Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton. “But with that many new projects, you have to ask if they’ll run into local opposition.”

Then there are jobs to consider. Net zero would mean eliminating coal and drastically reducing oil and gas use, displacing hundreds of thousands of fossil-fuel workers.

On the flip side, millions of new green jobs would spring up for workers retrofitting homes or building wind farms, though those jobs might not be located in the same regions.

Politicians would need to figure out how to gain public acceptance for the sweeping changes unfolding, while protecting vulnerable Americans from harm.

What both studies do illustrate is that there’s little room for delay.

“It may seem like 2050 is a long way off,” said Dr. Jenkins. “But if you think about the timelines for policies, business decisions and capital investments, it’s really more like the day after tomorrow.”

Developing countries contribute a small fraction of the emissions from cars and power plants. But they're enduring some of the worst damage from climate change, like island nations that face being erased by sea level rise.

The U.S has committed to a 50% to 52% reduction in emissions by 2030,

Over that period, the U.S. has cumulatively emitted the most of any country.

The United Nations is calling on countries to be carbon neutral by 2050, which means if a country is still emitting greenhouse gas emissions, they're being absorbed by forests or other means to keep them from entering the atmosphere.

With hundreds of millions of people vulnerable to extreme weather like severe storms and droughts, developing countries secured a promise for $100 billion in climate finance annually from developed nations. The funding goes to projects like sustainable transportation and renewable energy, as well as helping communities prepare for more extreme events. Still, as of 2019, developed countries are still below the goal, which will be a point of contention in the COP26 negotiations.

Islington’s project is just one of many innovations by cities around the world to provide heat to residents and businesses while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving efficiency and saving people money.

Stockholm is also using heat from sewage, as well as tapping data centers and other sources to supply heat for much of the city.

If you can start to use a whole array of waste heat streams, you’re taking out a big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions,

We don’t really need to burn gas at 1,000 degrees centigrade [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit] to get your bath to 30 degrees centigrade,” Dr. Gluyas added. “What we need to do is work with nature to optimize the use of heat.

The concept of district heating networks is not new and may, in fact, date from 14th-century France or even, some say, the Roman Empire

New York City has one of the world’s largest district systems to provide heat, cooling and, in some cases, even electricity to many buildings in Manhattan.

Though perhaps less wasteful than having a boiler in every single building, it is not the most efficient district heating system, as it was designed to heat a building on the coldest day of the year with all the windows open — partly a public health legacy of the 1918 pandemic.

But the innovation — which took more than five years to plan and build, and began operations in March 2020 — was to feed in heat from the Underground.

Typically, the hot air from the Underground is released into the air through stations and ventilation shafts. In this case, however, air is drawn from a ventilation shaft at an abandoned Underground station into an energy center where a series of heat transfers take place, eventually leading to delivery of the heat into the buildings in the network.

For our residents, locally, this is absolutely the right thing to do,” because it saves money in an area where many residents struggle to afford heat, Mr. Townsend said. “And this is a perfect solution for big cities across the world.

Heat from wastewater and sewage now provides about 70 percent of the space heating and hot water for the 43 buildings connected to the network, with the remaining 30 percent coming from natural gas, though the goal is to end that by 2030. The electricity powering the heat pumps is 97 percent zero-carbon, supplied by hydroelectric dams.

Every time we take a shower, do the dishes or do a load of laundry, the water is still hot when it goes down the drain,” said Ashley St. Clair, Vancouver’s senior renewable energy planner.“It’s flowing under our streets, and we’re already collecting it through the traditional infrastructure of wastewater pipes, and to be able to tap into that waste heat is really the ultimate circular economy.”

And it cannot come soon enough: This year alone, Vancouver has experienced several bouts of extreme weather, made more likely and intense because of climate change: heat domes, wildfires and catastrophic flooding, which recently cut the city off by road and rail from the rest of Canada. Having its own heat and hot water supply has been an additional benefit of the project, Ms. St. Clair said.

Stockholm, Mr. Rylander said, has particularly good connectivity to Northern Europe, Finland and Russia, which makes it attractive to data center companies, as does Sweden’s relatively clean power mix. However, they use biomass to produce a significant amount of heat and power, the renewable classification of which is debated by experts.

“If you establish a data center in a cold place like Sweden, it’s stupid to waste the heat, because heat has power and value in a cold country.”

“We’re very clear that we are an experiment, and we are doing the work that will enable others to benefit from it.”

for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.

Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.

Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now.

a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).

in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).

there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists

If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.

it is entirely possible to grow food that’s better for us and grow it in ways that are better for the land. Better land management techniques include limiting the use of fertilizers that contribute to emissions and planting crops that add carbon to the soil.

The way forward, they point out, requires reducing planet-warming emissions, removing carbon from the atmosphere by storing it in trees or soil, and changing diets, especially among the world’s wealthy.

it also requires a hard look at who gets to eat what

Scientists often refer to these as “natural climate solutions,” and they point out that sequestering carbon in the soil not only helps slow down climate change, it can also make the soil hardier to deal with extreme weather events and ultimately increase crop yields.

“Farming must work with nature, not against it,

“The I.P.C.C.’s land report puts a big question mark on the future of industrial agriculture.”

when it comes to land use, better forest management has the “largest potential for reducing emissions.”

The world’s forests are under intense threat, though, especially in the tropics. They are cleared for things we consume, including soy, palm oil and beef cattle

Nowhere is that more stark than in the world’s largest rain forest, the Amazon. Its destruction has increased drastically since Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power with a promise to further open the forest to commercial exploitation.

Livestock can be raised on lands that are too arid to grow crops, they can be fed differently so they produce lower methane emissions and they produce manure that can fertilize soil.

animal protein is vital nourishment for a hungry child and raising animals has been part of the culture and livelihood for millions of people around the world.

But if the heaviest meat eaters in places like the United States and Australia cut back on meat, especially red meat, it would make a big difference.

It is entirely possible to eat well without depriving ourselves. There are tips we can borrow from many traditional cuisines.

Taken together, the amount of food that is wasted and unused accounts for close to a 10th of global emissions.

Curbing food waste is arguably the single most effective thing that can be done at an individual or household level to slow down climate change.

Extreme floods that have historically struck some coastal cities and small island nations once every 100 years will become an annual occurrence by 2050

if emissions continue to increase, global sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century — around 12 percent higher than the group estimated as recently as 2013

Melting glaciers could harm water supplies, and warming oceans could wreck marine fisheries.

“The conclusion is inescapable: The impacts of climate change on the ocean are well underway. Unless we take very serious action very soon, these impacts will get worse — much, much worse.”

More than 100 scientists from around the world contributed to the latest report by the IPCC, which found that profound and potentially devastating consequences lie ahead for marine life, Arctic ecosystems and entire human societies if climate change continues unabated.

While dozens of smaller nations did unveil plans for coming years, the world’s largest emitters have stopped short of committing to transformational changes.

Sea level rise is accelerating, and the world could see 3.6 feet in total sea level rise by the year 2100 in a very high-emissions scenario. In 2013, t

The ocean is losing oxygen, growing more acidic, taking up an increasing amount of heat, and becoming more stratified, with warm water at the surface preventing cooler, nutrient rich waters from rising. All of these changes have profound consequences for marine ecosystems.

when scientists behind the report looked at an alternative method for gauging how much seas could rise — simply canvassing the views of experts — even larger estimates emerged. The group’s findings only highlight “likely” amounts of sea level rise, meaning they do not represent worst-case scenarios.

For some major coastal cities, a historical 100-year flood event will happen annually by the year 2050. That includes large cities such as Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Lima, Singapore, Barcelona and Sydney, the report says

“Even our language has to adapt: What once was called ‘climate change’ is now truly a ‘climate crisis.’ … We are seeing unprecedented temperatures, unrelenting storms and undeniable science.”

“The world’s coasts provide a home to around 1.9 billion people and over half of the world’s megacities — all of which are in grave danger if we don’t act immediately to prevent rising temperatures and sea levels,”

“Extreme high temperatures, coastal flooding, and more frequent natural disasters are becoming the new normal. ... This is what the climate crisis looks like now.

the system could still tip toward very large ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica. If that happens, the rate of sea-level rise could become truly catastrophic, especially by the years 2200 and 2300, when it could exceed 10 feet.

Permafrost, which contains enormous amounts of carbon that can be released as it thaws, has warmed to “record high levels.” Summer Arctic sea ice extent is now probably lower than at any time in “at least 1,000 years,” and the oldest, thickest ice has already declined by 90 percent.

“Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,”

In the United States, cities facing fast-moving sea-level danger include Los Angeles, Miami, Savannah, Honolulu, San Juan, Key West and San Diego.

One of the most shocking findings involves “marine heat waves,” which have been blamed for mass deaths of corals, kelp forests and other key ocean organisms. The large majority of these events are already directly attributable to climate change, and by the year 2100, they will become 20 times more common in the best case, and 50 times as common in the absolute worst case, compared with the late 1800s

Many of these changes to oceans and ice are unfolding in parts of the Earth where few people live, and so the shifts are not always readily visible to most humans. But the changes taking place there ultimately will affect people around the globe, in the form of rising seas and other impacts. And as those impacts worsen, so does the difficulty of adapting to them.

the grim findings in Wednesday’s report should be a call to action.

"We must not let these climate change impacts paralyze us,” she said in an email. “We must address root causes of climate change by slowing and eventually stopping accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions.”

There is much that humans can do to blunt the expected impacts in the meantime, she said, such as restoring mangroves and protecting reefs and marshes to reduce storm impacts on coastal communities.

“Alone, these measures cannot meet all the challenges of climate change to oceans and coasts, but they are doable, cost-effective and make a difference,”

“I get chills when I see those young people, especially at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”

Naomi said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have overstated their impact.AD“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are manmade CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”

Naomi argues that other factors, such as solar energy, play a role — though the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth has actually declined since the 1970s, according to federal measurements

The German media have described her as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Naomi says she is not a member of AfD — she describes herself as libertarian — but acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.

Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors, Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its staff and researchers enjoy ready access to the Trump administration, and one of its senior fellows, William Happer, served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council between September 2018 and 2019.

An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions should be viewed as beneficial to society — not a pollutant that drives global warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,”

Why would an American think tank want to get involved in German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent investigation aired on German television.

For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions this year by 40 percent compared to 1990 — and by up to 95 percent by mid-century.

The proposal described Naomi as “the star” of a “Climate Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over 100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Naomi was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.

Taylor said the tendency to associate Naomi with Greta is “kind of natural” — and benefits Heartland’s message.“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.

Europe also saw a smaller decline than expected, falling by 0.2% compared with 2.2% over the last 10 years.One common theme around the world is continued use of gas and oil

"The climate will not let us wait until 2020 when the Paris agreement comes into force," said Nicaragua's chief negotiator, Paul Oquist."Climate change is happening now and it's vital that immediate actions to cut emissions become a feature of this summit."

The tally was all the more damning because fewer than half of all countries submitted fresh targets to the United Nations. The Paris climate accord, designed to limit an increase in global temperatures, had urged them to do so by the end of 2020.

Likewise, China, which currently produces the largest share of emissions, has yet to submit new 2030 targets to the United Nations.

The Biden administration has said it aspires to net-zero emissions by 2050 but has yet to detail how it will get there.

Some of the biggest emitter countries — including Australia, Brazil and Russia — submitted new plans for 2030 without increasing their ambitions.

Mexico lowered its climate targets, which the Natural Resources Defense Council described as a signal that “Mexico is effectively retreating from its previous leadership on climate and clean energy.”

In contrast, 36 countries — among them Britain, Chile, Kenya, Nepal and the 27 countries of the European Union — raised their climate targets.

The end goal is to limit global temperature increase to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of 1990 levels.

“This report confirms the shocking lack of urgency, and genuine action,” Aubrey Webson, a diplomat from Antigua and Barbuda and the chairman of the alliance, said in a statement.

in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

Americans choosing Trump would send the signal that they don’t care about the climate, Light said.

“In the case of a second Trump term, we’ve got to totally double down on the efforts to communicate how serious the non-federal actors are in the United States,” Light said. “And what you really want to try to make sure is that those people in other countries who are not in favor of strengthening their countries’ own climate target are not able to point to the United States and say nothing’s going on there.”

The concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases is at a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. The planet is already 1C hotter than it was before industrialization.

As the technology for retrieving oil and gas has advanced, with hydraulic fracturing, the cost of production has plummeted. The US is now a net exporter of oil products.

Much of the expansion expected would be for feedstocks to make chemicals and plastics, explained Courtney Bernhardt, the group’s research director.

“The US is already struggling to meet climate commitments and transition to a low-carbon future,” Bernhardt said. “This analysis shows that we’re heading in the wrong direction and really need to slow emissions growth from the oil, gas and petrochemical industries.”

In the race against Trump, all the major Democratic candidates have similarly pledged to seek at least net-zero emissions by 2050.

The League of Conservation Voters’ called the House committee effort encouraging and said the announcement “is further proof that elections have consequences”. But other groups were critical, saying the plan would not transition away from fossil fuels fast enough.

By 2030 Microsoft will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975

fund the efforts by expanding its internal carbon fee – a fee the company has charged to its business groups to account for their carbon emissions.

$1bn over the next four years to speed up the development of carbon removal technology

will require technology by 2030 that doesn’t fully exist today

A company’s most powerful tool for fighting climate change is its political influence,

In November, more than 1,000 Google workers signed a public letter calling on their employer to commit to an aggressive “company-wide climate plan” that includes canceling contracts with the fossil fuel industry and halting its donations to climate change deniers.

Microsoft and Amazon have come under fire from activist tech workers who have demanded that they stop supplying technology to oil and gas companies because of the polluting nature of fossil-fuel extraction.

the 2015 Paris climate accord to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions. Mr. Trump wants no part of it, while Mr. Biden and his party have promised to keep the U.S. in the pact.

Mr. Biden last month, in the second of two major climate speeches he gave this summer, said it is important for the U.S. to show international leadership on climate. As part of a recommitment he would make to the Paris pact, he would push other countries to further cut emissions.

One of the few mentions the Trump campaign agenda makes of environmental issues is joining “with Other Nations to Clean Up our Planet’s Oceans.”

The power sector would go first and end its emissions by 2035, with the government’s help. In contrast to Mr. Trump’s skepticism of climate science, Mr. Biden’s goals mirror the emissions-reduction path recommended by a U.N. scientific panel in 2018.

the Biden campaign has proposed a mix of financial incentives, regulatory mandates and new laws that may face a stiff challenge in Congress.

Mr. Trump says deregulation is the way to help companies create jobs, and his appointees have spent years making industry-friendly changes to rules governing coal, oil and natural-gas production.

Mr. Biden has tried to counter charges of overregulation by making his climate policy largely about infrastructure and investment. His proposal to spend $2 trillion over four years aims to ease global warming and harden infrastructure for what extreme weather can’t be avoided, but also to help revive the economy.

They promise a nationwide expansion of mass transit in every city of more than 100,000 people, with an emphasis on emissions-free systems. They would upgrade more than four million buildings to improve efficiency, and boost research and development on clean-energy technology, including commercial battery storage and advanced nuclear power.

Mr. Trump favors oil, gas and coal interests, and they need more interstate pipelines and export terminals to keep growing, Mr. McKenna said.

Others point to driving’s high cost. Car insurance has skyrocketed in price in recent years, increasing nearly 14 percent between 2022 and 2023. (The average American now spends around 3 percent of their yearly income on car insurance.) Used and new car prices have also soared in the last few years, thanks to a combination of supply chain disruptions and high inflation.

E-scooters, e-bikes and ride-sharing also provide Gen Zers options that weren’t available to earlier generations. (Half of ride-sharing users are between the ages of 18 and 29, according to a poll from 2019.) And Gen Zers have the ability to do things online — hang out with friends, take classes, play games — which used to be available only in person.

Whether this shift will last depends on whether Gen Z is acting out of inherent preferences, or simply postponing key life milestones that often spur car purchases. Getting married, having children, or moving out of urban centers are all changes that encourage (or, depending on your view of the U.S. public transit system, force) people to drive more.

In 1997, 43 percent of 16-year-olds and 62 percent of 17-year-olds had driver’s licenses. In 2020, those numbers had fallen to 25 percent and 45 percent.

Millennials went through a similar phase. Around a decade ago, many newspaper articles and research papers noted that the millennial generation — often defined as those born between 1981 and 1996 — were shunning cars. The trend was so pronounced that some researchers dubbed millennials the “go-nowhere” generation.

The average number of vehicle miles driven by young people dropped 24 percent between 2001 and 2009, according to a report from the Frontier Group and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. And at the same time, vehicle miles traveled per person in the United States — which had been climbing for more than 50 years — began to plateau.

adult millennials continue to drive around 8 percent less every day than members of Generation X and baby boomers. As millennials have grown up, got married and had kids, the distance they travel in cars has increased — but they haven’t fully closed the gap with previous generations.

data has shown that U.S. car culture isn’t as strong as it once was. “Up through the baby boom generation, every generation drove more than the last,” Dutzik said. Forecasters expected that trend to continue, with driving continuing to skyrocket well into the 2030s. “But what we saw with millennials, I think very clearly, is that trend stopped,”

If Gen Zers continue to eschew driving, it could have significant effects on the country’s carbon emissions. Transportation is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States. There are roughly 66 million members of Gen Z living in the United States. If each one drove just 10 percent less than the national average — that is, driving 972 miles less every year — that would save 25.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from spewing into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent to the annual emissions of more than six coal-fired power plants.

This shift has made it impossible to pass any legislation through Congress to help deal with the problem. That has forced President Obama to adopt a different approach

After the 2010 defeat in the Senate of the so-called cap-and-trade strategy, which was originally a Republican idea, Mr. Obama has taken to using the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory powers under the Clean Air Act, circumventing Congress entirely.

Is it possible to turn the Republican Party around?It won’t be easy. Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are wedded to defending a declining coal industry and advancing the interests of oil companies, most clearly in their support for the Keystone pipeline. Many of the party’s lawmakers and presidential candidates get a lot of money from people like the Koch brothers, who have multimillion-dollar contributions for anybody who will stand against efforts to curb the use of fossil fuels.

there is more than money to the story. For many Republicans, climate change poses an existential quagmire. “To them it sounds like, ‘Everything we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution is going to kill us; the response must be a big government response and, by the way, it has to be international,’” said Mr. Goldston.

even Senator McCain has now walked away from his previous self, mocking President Obama for “saying that the biggest problem we have is climate change.”

climate change denial has never been particularly strong among street-level Republicans. Recent polls find that even conservative Republicans believe the climate is changing and humans are, to some extent, to blame.

Straight denial is getting tougher as the scientific consensus strengthens. And China’s efforts to cut emissions have defanged the argument that it is pointless for the United States to act alone.

In this context, the Obama administration’s strategy of using the Clean Air Act to force emissions cuts could help change the politics.

“Some Republican governors will start taking action because the alternative is for the federal government to impose something,” Mr. Goldston said. “This will change the politics

Mankiw, George W. Bush’s former top economic adviser, argues that putting a price on carbon emissions — the preferred prescription of economists across the political spectrum— could fit well within the Republican canon.

“People are afraid this is an excuse to raise taxes and expand government generally,” Professor Mankiw said. “We need to convince them this not a tax increase but a tax shift,” using revenue from a carbon tax to reduce, say, the Social Security payroll tax, while keeping the overall tax burden roughly the same.