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"While we're burning down and the glaciers are disappearing and the Arctic is melting and hurricanes ... moderators in the debate groups have ignored this issue totally," Inslee says. "Yes, it's a good thing that it was brought up, but it was very, very disillusioning that one of the candidates prevented a rational discussion of this because it deserves it big time."

The fires are under control now, but we have to understand we have been ravaged by what I would call not wildfires, but climate fires. These are climate fires, fundamentally, because the recent cataclysmic events we've suffered now in multiple years

When you talk to the firefighters, what they will tell you is that they're seeing fire behavior that they've never seen before. Not only are they more frequent, but the intensity of these fires — people have just never seen this in our state before. And these are not just forest fires. These are grass and brush and sagebrush fires. And the situation now is the heat and the aridity have dried out this fuel, so that they are like putting gasoline all over the state of Washington.

Some of the first victims [of climate change are] the farmers who had their fields devastated in the floods last year. This year, they got hit by the 100 mile-an-hour-plus [winds]. It knocked down all their corn.

The smoke from the forest fires have created a risk for a degradation of our grapes. We're having changes in the hydrological cycle where you don't have irrigation water.

So farmers are one of the first groups who were hardest hit, but they are also the group who can play such a pivotal role in reducing carbon, getting it out of our atmosphere because the soil can sequester carbon. We need to get carbon out of the atmosphere and into our topsoil and farmers play a very important role in that and can have a revenue stream so that we can pay farmers for a service of sequestering carbon to get it out of the atmosphere.

And that plus they have the ability to grow abundant biofuels, which they're doing today.

There is progress going on in the United States. We just need to make it national. That's No. 1.

No. 2, the technology, the rapidity of the technological progress is incredible.

And the third reason that we need to be optimistic is that it's just the only effective tool. I think maybe it was Churchill who said, "when you're going through hell, keep going." And that's what we need to do in this matter.

In fact, the news from Wall Street lately has mostly been about retreat from climate goals, rather than recommitment. Banks and asset managers are withdrawing from international climate alliances and chafing at their rules. Regional banks are stepping up lending to fossil fuel producers. Sustainable investment funds have sustained crippling outflows, and many have collapsed.

In some cases, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: If firms collectively shift to cleaner energy, a cooler climate benefits everyone more in the future

in the short term, each firm has an individual incentive to cash in on fossil fuels, making the transition much harder to achieve.

when it comes to avoiding climate damage to their own operations, the financial industry is genuinely struggling to comprehend what a warming future will mean.

A global compact of financial institutions made commitments worth $130 trillion to try to bring down emissions, confident that governments would create a regulatory and financial infrastructure to make those investments profitable. And in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed.

What about the risk that climate change poses to the financial industry’s own investments, through more powerful hurricanes, heat waves that knock out power grids, wildfires that wipe out towns?

“If we think about what is going to be the best way to tilt your portfolios in the direction to benefit, it’s really difficult to do,”

“These will probably be great investments over 20 years, but when we’re judged over one to three years, it’s a little more challenging for us.”

Some firms cater to institutional clients, like public employee pension funds, that want combating climate change to be part of their investment strategy and are willing to take a short-term hit. But they aren’t a majority

And over the past couple of years, many banks and asset managers have shrunk from anything with a climate label for fear of losing business from states that frown on such concerns.

On top of that, the war in Ukraine scrambled the financial case for backing a rapid energy transition. Artificial intelligence and the movement toward greater electrification are adding demand for power, and renewables haven’t kept up

All of that is about the relative appeal of investments that would slow climate change

If you bought some of the largest solar-energy exchange-traded funds in early 2023, you would have lost about 20 percent of your money, while the rest of the stock market soared.

There is evidence that banks and investors price in some physical risk, but also that much of it still lurks, unheeded.

“I’m very, very worried about this, because insurance markets are this opaque weak link,” Dr. Sastry said. “There are parallels to some of the complex linkages that happened in 2008, where there is a weak and unregulated market that spills over to the banking system.”

Regulators worry that failing to understand those ripple effects could not just put a single bank in trouble but even become a contagion that would undermine the financial system.

But while the European Central Bank has made climate risk a consideration in its policy and oversight, the Federal Reserve has resisted taking a more active role, despite indications that extreme weather is feeding inflation and that high interest rates are slowing the transition to clean energy.

“The argument has been, ‘Unless we can convincingly show it’s part of our mandate, Congress should deal with it, it’s none of our business,’”

a much nearer-term uncertainty looms: the outcome of the U.S. election, which could determine whether further action is taken to address climate concerns or existing efforts are rolled back. An aggressive climate strategy might not fare as well during a second Trump administration, so it may seem wise to wait and see how it shakes out.

big companies are hesitating on climate-sensitive investments as November approaches, but says that “two things are misguided and quite dangerous about that hypothesis.”

One: States like California are establishing stricter rules for carbon-related financial disclosures and may step it up further if Republicans win

And two: Europe is phasing in a “carbon border adjustment mechanism,” which will punish polluting companies that want to do business there.

at the moment, even European financial institutions feel pressure from the United States, which — while providing some of the most generous subsidies so far for renewable-energy investment — has not imposed a price on carbon.

The global insurance company Allianz has set out a plan to align its investments in a way that would prevent warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, if everyone else did the same. But it’s difficult to steer a portfolio to climate-friendly assets while other funds take on polluting companies and reap short-term profits for impatient clients.

“This is the main challenge for an asset manager, to really bring the customer along,” said Markus Zimmer, an Allianz economist. Asset managers don’t have sufficient tools on their own to move money out of polluting investments and into clean ones, if they want to stay in business,

“Of course it helps if the financial industry is somehow ambitious, but you cannot really substitute the lack of actions by policymakers,”

According to new research, the benefit is greater when decarbonization occurs faster, because the risks of extreme damage mount as time goes on. But without a uniform set of rules, someone is bound to scoop up the immediate profits, disadvantaging those that don’t — and the longer-term outcome is adverse for all.

he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)

It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.

Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.

China’s economy depends heavily on cheap coal-fired electricity, and the country has a history of balking at outside reviews of its industries. China has also been plagued by major corruption cases, particularly among coal companies.

Domestic and external pressures have driven the Chinese government to take firmer action to curb emissions from fossil fuels, especially coal. Growing public anger about the noxious air that often envelops Beijing and many other Chinese cities has prompted the government to introduce restrictions on coal and other sources of smog, with the side benefit of reducing carbon dioxide pollution.

The climate deal will be a substantial, if rare, bright spot in a wide-ranging summit meeting that is expected to be dominated by potential sources of friction between Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi.

The president plans to raise a number of contentious topics on Friday, White House aides said, including cyberattacks on American companies and government agencies, China’s increasingly aggressive reclamation of islands and atolls in disputed areas of the South China Sea, and Mr. Xi’s clampdown on dissidents and lawyers in China.

Under a cap-and-trade system, a concept created by American economists, governments place a cap on the amount of carbon pollution that may be emitted annually. Companies can then buy and sell permits to pollute. Western economists have long backed the idea as a market-driven way to push industry to cleaner forms of energy, by making polluting energy more expensive.

The task may prove most challenging for India, which is struggling to lift more than half of its population of 1.25 billion out of poverty and to provide basic electricity to 300 million of them. But rich countries are intent that India not get stuck on a coal-dependent development path.

President Obama has endorsed the idea of a price on carbon — in the form of a tax, or a cap-and-trade system like California’s — and leaders of Canada, Chile, Ethiopia, France, Germany and Mexico endorsed the idea at the start of the Paris conference. But there was not nearly enough support to incorporate it into the Paris Agreement.

China, meanwhile, is investing so heavily in clean energy that some observers think its carbon emissions might have hit a peak — a milestone that China had promised to reach only by 2030.

“It is essential that the developing countries are able to transform their energy system before they develop a level of dependence on coal that we have in the industrialized countries,” said Jan Burck of the activist group Germanwatch.

Giza Gaspar Martins, an Angolan diplomat who represents the Least Developed Countries, which negotiated in Paris as a bloc, said of the accord: “This puts a system in place to do climate action, but we will have a lot of work to do.” Photo

The United States will be one of them; through careful legal craftsmanship, the Paris Agreement will not be considered as its own treaty under American law but rather as an extension of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the Senate ratified in 1992.

By May, the United Nations climate staff will update its estimate for the combined impact of the national pledges (now known as nationally determined contributions, the qualifying word “intended” having been dropped). Estimates of the first round of pledges suggested that, if carried out, they would still result in a rise of 2.7 to 3.5 degrees Celsius (4.9 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — far above the newly adopted goal of just 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But as the Paris Agreement is put into place, the front lines of the battle to stabilize the planet’s atmosphere will shift elsewhere. At the start of the talks, 20 governments pledged to double spending on clean-energy research and development over the next five years, while a coalition of business leaders led by Bill Gates vowed to invest billions on developing renewable energy.

Climate activists have long used a “power of the people” approach to promote sustainability and organize globally, and the world leaders who met here credited “civil society” for keeping up the pressure.“Now the work to hold them to their promises begins,” the American environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben wrote on Twitter, moments after the gavel fell on the Paris Agreement. “1.5? Game on.”

One way out may be to reframe the debate. Global warming will affect billions of lives in the future. But, by one estimate, our love for fossil fuels may already be responsible for more deaths than those caused by wars, murders, and traffic accidents combined.

These figures come from the 2012 Climate Vulnerability Monitor. In 2010, some 4.5 million deaths could be attributed to air pollution, because of the production of carbon particles and nitrogen oxides. Another 500,000 deaths that year could be attributed to changes in climate, which lead to extreme weather events, flare ups in infectious diseases, and other disastrous phenomena.

Of course, things are only going to get worse. But few people will understand what “worse” will look like in the future.

Better to think about how our fossil fuel use is already affecting the planet and its inhabitants, and act now.

“And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us.”

“For I believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late,”

“We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its most destructive effects,” he said.

“What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it,”

Mr. Obama has staked much of his legacy on ensuring success here, spending much of the past year courting the leaders of China, India and other major emitters in hopes they would finally agree to slow their rapidly rising use of coal and other carbon-intensive fuels.

They stopped at the site immediately after Mr. Obama landed at Orly Airport and was driven through the quiet and largely blocked-off streets of Paris.

Mr. Hollande arrived at the climate talks at 7:46 a.m. and was greeted by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who was accompanied by Mr. Hollande’s former partner, the minister of ecology, Ségolène Royal.

Citing climate change as “a huge challenge,” Mr. Xi said it was “very important for China and the United States to be firmly committed to the right direction of building a new model of major country relations,” including by “partnering with each other to help the climate conference deliver its expected targets.”

“As the two largest economies in the world and the two largest carbon-emitters, we have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “And so our leadership on this issue has been absolutely vital, and I appreciate President Xi’s consistent cooperation on this issue.”

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of business and philanthropy leaders led by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates who have a combined total of $350 billion in private wealth, have pledged to invest in moving clean-energy technologies from laboratories to the marketplace.

“Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow,” he wrote in a column published in The Financial Times. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder.

In exchange, India was demanding free technology from other countries as well as significant financial aid. India has some incentives to cooperate with broader plans to curb emissions. Some studies suggest that more Indians could be displaced as a result of rising seas than people from any other country, that cities in India are already among the world’s most polluted, and that nearly a fifth of deaths in India are caused in part by air pollution.

he obtains some consolation by peering into the abyss, entertaining the worst-case scenarios of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming. Given the prospect of utter annihilation, he says, the “degraded muddle” that we might still manage to eke out should count “as an encouraging future.” It would be “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.”

The overarching frame for Wallace-Wells’s book is an analogous call to action: “How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?”

“The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,”

The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.

His New York magazine article already synthesized plenty of information about perilous climate risks and scared the bejeezus out of people; what are we supposed to do with this expanded litany of horrors?

He describes himself as a Bitcoin-buying, non-recycling city-dweller who hates camping. He was scared out of his “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded” inertia when he became immersed in the awful truth and, his book suggests, you can be too

it’s not as if any of the hair-raising material with which he has become intimately familiar has paralyzed him with fatalism — quite the opposite. “That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair,” he writes. What some activists have called “toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse — “should be empowering.”

even while staring down the bleak decades ahead, Wallace-Wells had a child. “She will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat,” he writes. “She will be living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.

Mobilization is impossible for people who are sleepwalking their way toward disaster; and mobilization is necessary, he says, to deploy the tools at our disposal, which include carbon taxes, carbon capture and green energy.

There is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try,” Wallace-Wells writes. “Any story that sticks is a good one.”

detail the possible future that awaits the planet should we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere and fail to arrest global warming. Floods, pestilence, famines, wildfires: What he calls the “elements of climate chaos” are veritably biblical in scope

“The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells

Every additional Senate seat that Democrats take in 2020 could help them pass a Green New Deal. Sudden demographic change—such as a surge in enthusiasm among young voters—could push electoral math in Democrats’ direction. And if a Green New Deal fails, the party could also make a “second go” at climate policy before the 2022 election—trying for something like the carbon-fee-and-dividend scheme endorsed by many Democrats, some Republicans, and most oil companies.

A breakthrough on a technology like carbon capture—which is financially supported by many oil firms—could rapidly scramble the partisan politics of climate change, making the GOP more willing to negotiate on a round of federal spending.

none of these possibilities changes the basic fact that a Green New Deal will be really, really, really hard to pass in the coming years. And if we want to avert disastrous climate change, the coming years are the most important ones we have.

hat urgency is at odds with the stance of the Trump administration, which has rolled back several Obama-era environmental regulations and incentivized the production of fossil fuels. Trump also has said he plans to withdraw the nation from the Paris climate accord and questioned the science of climate change just last month, saying on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that “I don’t know that it’s man-made” and that the warming trend “could very well go back.”

“This report draws a direct connection between the warming atmosphere and the resulting changes that affect Americans' lives, communities, and livelihoods, now and in the future,” the document reads, concluding that “the evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans' physical, social, and economic well-being are rising.

The report finds that the continental United States already is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was 100 years ago, surrounded by seas that are on average nine inches higher and being racked by far worse heat waves than the nation experienced only 50 years ago. But those figures offer only the prelude to even more potentially severe impacts. The report suggests that by 2050, the country could see as much as 2.3 additional degrees of warming in the continental United States. By that same year, in a high-end global-warming scenario, coral reefs in Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific territories could be bleaching every single year — conditions in which their survival would be in severe doubt. A record-warm year like 2016 would become routine.

In another major step, the authors of the new report have begun to put dollar signs next to projected climate damage, specifically within the United States. In a worst-case climate-change scenario, the document finds, labor-related losses by the year 2090 as a result of extreme heat — the sort that makes it difficult to work outdoors or seriously lowers productivity — could amount to an estimated $155 billion annually. Deaths from temperature extremes could take an economic toll of $141 billion per year in the same year, while coastal property damage could total $118 billion yearly, researchers found

Of course, mitigating climate change would also mitigate this damage, by as much as 58 percent in the case of high-temperature related deaths, the report finds.

The categorical tone of the new assessments reflects scientists' growing confidence in the ability to detect the role of a changing climate in individual extreme events, such as heat waves and droughts. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated computer simulations now allow them to project future changes in highly specific regions of the country

The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report, which examines all of North America (not just the United States), finds that over a decade, greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels declined by 1 percent per year. The result is that while North America emitted 24 percent of the world’s emissions in 2004, that was down to 17 percent in 2013. This occurred in part thanks to improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency, the growth of renewable energy and the swapping of coal-burning for natural gas.

“For the globe, we’re still going up, but regionally, there have been these changes in how humans have been acting that have caused our emissions to go down,” said Ted Schuur, a Northern Arizona University expert on permafrost carbon

The report concludes that it appears possible to for economies to grow — at least in the United States, Mexico and Canada — without increasing overall emissions of greenhouse gases. That would be an important signal for the ability of the world to slow climate change over the course of the century

“We are in a very dangerous position now where action could go forward or backward,” Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare told reporters Wednesday. “The next 12 months or so will really tell.”

Research from Climate Analytics released in early 2015, for example, suggested that global greenhouse emissions would need to hit zero by 2100 at the latest to have a good chance of keeping temperatures from rising more than 2°C by the end of the century

“Ambitious plans are very good but not enough,” says Niklas Höhne, a founding partner of NewClimate Institute. “They need to be cast in stone with laws and regulation.”

There’s an even bigger elephant in the room: such bold climate proposals are not on the table for the world’s three biggest emitters, the U.S., China and India

Global emissions rose last year at the fastest rate in years thanks in large part to a spike in those countries even as emissions fell in the European Union, Japan and elsewhere.

Prior to Donald Trump’s election, the U.S. federal government had suggested the country could implement policies to reduce emissions 80% by 2050, which would have been a significant move in direction of a net-zero target

Trump has not only done away with long-term thinking to reduce the country’s emissions but targeted a slew of environmental rules for rollback. Carbon emissions rose last year more than 3% even as cities and states continued their own pushes to reduce emissions.

China has reversed a ban on the construction of new coal-fired power plants while India is projected to continue to grow its use of that fossil fuel. Others including Brazil and Australia are also backtracking on their climate change commitments.

All too often, our culture broadly equates “environmentalism” with personal consumerism

But that doesn’t mean we do nothing.

blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom.

this raises the price of admission to the climate movement to an exorbitant level, often pricing out people of color and other marginalized groups.

While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely

Shame, on the other hand, tells us that we are bad people, that we are beyond redemption. It paralyzes us.

“I refuse to believe people should be shamed for living in the world we’ve built.”

Climate change is a huge problem, and to face it, we have to be willing to make personal sacrifices we can feel. It’s our responsibility not only to future generations but also to each other — right here, right now.

we have an ethical obligation to shrink our carbon footprints. The United States is the world’s second largest emitter, only recently having fallen from first place. And our historical contribution is even more appalling. The United States is responsible for more than a third of the carbon pollution that has warmed our planet today — more than any other single nation.

the more we focus on individual action and neglect systemic change, the more we’re just sweeping leaves on a windy day. So while personal actions can be meaningful starting points, they can also be dangerous stopping points.

e need to broaden our definition of personal action beyond what we buy or use. Start by changing your lightbulb, but don’t stop there. Taking part in a climate strike or showing up to a rally is a personal action. Organizing neighbors to sue a power plant that’s poisoning the community is a personal action.

Voting is a personal action. When choosing your candidate, investigate their environmental policies. If they aren’t strong enough, demand better. Once that person is in office, hold them accountable

We have 11 years — not to start but to finish saving the planet.

US coal companies had already lost 90% of their value, he noted, but banks were also at risk. “Just like in any other major structural change, those banks overexposed to the sunset sectors will suffer accordingly,” he told the Guardian.

“Some [assets] will go up, many will go down. The question is whether the transition is smooth or is it something that is delayed and then happens very abruptly. That is an open question,” he said. “The longer the adjustment is delayed in the real economy, the greater the risk that there is a sharp adjustment.”

Far from damaging the global economy, climate action bolsters economic growth, according to Carney. “There is a need for [action] to achieve net zero emissions, but actually it comes at a time when there is a need for a big increase in investment globally to accelerate the pace of global growth, to help get global interest rates up, to get us out of this low-growth, low-interest-rate trap we are in.”

“Certainly the UK financial system is one of the most sophisticated at managing this risk. The UK can extend that lead, for the good of the UK, for the good of the world,” he said. “A number of the industrial solutions draw on the strengths of UK innovation, from the use of artificial intelligence in energy systems through to potentially advanced materials like graphene. There is a big upside for the UK economy.”

Reacting to the Guardian’s revelations about fossil fuel companies, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK Labour party, said: “Labour will delist companies that fail to meet environmental criteria from the [London Stock Exchange], and reform the finance sector to make it part of the solution to climate change instead of lending to companies that are part of the problem.”