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Second, the science shows that the older a tree gets, the more carbon it can absorb and store. It's like slowly turning up the speed on a vacuum cleaner. That means that we need to not only protect the old forests but also allow the young forests to grow old. It also means that protecting forests that are already established is one of the most effective strategies when it comes to climate change.

Third, we all support the re-establishment of forests on lands where there are none currently, but that is a long-term strategy and we need short-term solutions that address the current climate emergency. We only have about eight years to turn things around, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is much more effective to protect a natural forest that already exists than to plant a new one. It takes decades, if not up to a century for a forest ecosystem to evolve and time is not on our side when it comes to avoiding climate chaos.

“We’re going to do it in a way that’s very deliberate,” White House domestic climate adviser Gina McCarthy told reporters Monday in a call organized by the World Resources Institute. The administration wants to transition to a cleaner economy with good-paying occupations in communities that have been hit hardest by unemployment and underinvestment, she said. “It’s intended to meet the moment we are in.”

“We are way off track,” Guterres said. “This must be the year for action — the make-it-or-break-it year.”

China, the largest greenhouse gas polluter, has said it plans to reach peak emissions by 2030 and effectively erase its carbon footprint by 2060, though the details remain uncertain

despite myriad diplomatic tensions between the two countries, the United States and China vowed Saturday to jointly combat climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”

The world remains nowhere near meeting the central Paris aim of limiting Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels — or ideally, remaining closer to 1.5 Celsius. Failure to hit those targets, scientists have warned, will result in a cascade of costly and devastating effects.

“We are on the verge of the abyss,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Monday

To craft the new pledge in the administration’s first 100 days, White House officials scrambled staffers at agencies across the government to look for funding, programs and policies that could help curb emissions in the years ahead. Agency by agency, sector by sector, federal officials tallied up the math in an effort to make Biden’s pledge credible.

The International Energy Agency this week projected that global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise by 1.5 billion tons in 2021 — the second-largest increase in history — as the world comes out of the pandemic-induced downturn

But other major emitters, including China, India and Russia, have yet to spell out how exactly they intend to help put the world on a more sustainable trajectory.

In the United States, the power sector represents one of the best opportunities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Friday, a collection of 13 utilities, including Exelon, National Grid and PSEG, urged Biden to pursue a range of policies “to enable deep decarbonization of the power sector, including a clean electricity standard that ensures the power sector, as a whole, reduces its carbon emissions by 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”

The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, are already laying the groundwork to curb methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling, in part by reviving Obama administration standards reversed under Trump

the EPA is moving ahead to phase down the production and importation of hydrofluorocarbons — which are widely used as refrigerants and in air conditioning — by 85 percent over the next 15 years, as mandated by Congress.

Environmental activists, Democratic lawmakers, foreign leaders and hundreds of private companies, including Apple and Walmart, have implored the White House to make the boldest climate pledge possible.

Advocacy groups and academics have published detailed analyses, demonstrating ways they say the nation could cut at least half its emissions by the end of the decade.

“This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate,”

to reach the 50 percent target, the administration will have to make some difficult-to-guarantee assumptions about the future. For instance, that new regulations aimed at curbing emissions won’t be reversed by a future administration or the courts — even though Trump furiously dismantled key Obama-era climate policies.

some Republicans have insisted that the far-reaching changes needed to cut greenhouse gas pollution so fast could harm an already struggling economy, particularly in communities that still depend on the fossil fuel industry.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has argued that Biden’s aggressive climate actions could kill thousands of jobs in her state. On the Senate floor last month, she called the notion that new policies could quickly replace lost jobs in coal and other fossil fuels with ones in renewable energy “a fantasy world that does not exist.”

Persuading other key nations to bolster the promises they made in Paris remains critical if the world is to meet its collective goal of slowing Earth’s warming. The targets set by countries such as China, India, Russia and Brazil could dramatically affect whether the world can reach the goals set almost six years ago.

“The international community will have the opportunity to see that Biden is good for his word,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “A lot of diplomacy is about momentum and building momentum.”

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

Our history provides many examples of hopes for progress that seemed hopelessly naïve, up until suddenly they weren’t: abolition, female suffrage, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and now, possibly, a just climate policy. Let’s not throw in the towel, Mr. Krugman.

These paid family leaves need to be divided into two parts: postpartum recovery time for a parent who gave birth to the child joining the family, and additional weeks of paid leave for each parent for the purpose of family bonding and adjustment.

The distinction between postpartum time and bonding time is key. Research has shown that, in many professional fields at least, gender-neutral family leave programs advantage male parents and disadvantage women parents. Men, receiving equal benefits with nothing close to the same burden, use the extra time off to advance their careers while women fall farther behind.

In the electricity sector, emissions plunged by 10.3 percent in 2020, driven by a sharp decline in coal burning. As electricity demand sagged nationwide, utilities ran their coal plants far less often because coal has become the most expensive fuel in many parts of the country. Instead, they used more natural gas — which produces less carbon dioxide than coal, but still generates significant heat-trapping methane — and drew more heavily on emissions-free wind and solar power.

Emissions from heavy industry, such as steel and cement, dropped 7 percent in 2020 as automakers and other manufacturers churned out fewer goods amid the economic slump. America’s buildings, which produce carbon dioxide when they burn oil or natural gas for heat, saw emissions fall 6.2 percent, driven by both lockdowns and warmer-than-average weather.

Transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gases, saw a 14.7 percent decline in emissions in 2020 as millions of people stopped driving to work and airlines canceled flights. While travel started picking up again in the latter half of the year as states relaxed their lockdowns, Americans drove 15 percent fewer miles over all last year than they did in 2019 and the demand for jet fuel fell by more than one-third.

Renewable energy surged in 2020, as energy companies overcame disruptions from the pandemic to build a record number of new wind turbines and solar panels ahead of a key deadline to claim a federal tax credit. The United States produced roughly as much electricity from renewable sources last year as it did from coal, a milestone that has never been reached before.

The other caveat is that America’s emissions could tick back up again once vaccines are widely distributed and the economy recovers. The Rhodium Group report noted that a similar rebound occurred after the financial crisis of 2008-9 caused emissions to fall sharply. And it noted that many sectors, like air travel and steel making, have already been rebounding in recent months.

“The vast majority of 2020’s emission reductions were due to decreased economic activity and not from any structural changes that would deliver lasting reductions in the carbon intensity of our economy.”

Scientists warn that even a big one-year drop in emissions is not enough to stop global warming. Until humanity’s emissions are essentially zeroed out and nations are no longer adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the planet will continue to heat up. As if to underscore that warning, European researchers announced last week that 2020 was quite likely tied with 2016 as the hottest year on record.

The World Economic Forum launched a campaign this year to plant one trillion trees to absorb carbon. While planting trees might help cancel out the last 10 years of CO2 emissions, it cannot solve the climate crisis on its own, according to Waring.

Michael Bloomberg in unveiling his recently announced $500 million Beyond Carbon campaign.

“It is time for all of us to accept that climate change is the challenge of our time.” He concluded, “It may be a moon shot — but it’s the only shot we’ve got.”

In 1970, Dr. Logsdon wrote a book, “The Decision to Go to the Moon,” that laid out four conditions that made Apollo possible

it has to be “a singular act that would force action, that you couldn’t ignore.”

leaders in a position to direct the resources necessary to meet the goal on “a warlike basis,” with very deep national pockets

“the objective has to be technically feasible.”

What would be the “action-forcing stimulus” for a climate moon shot, he asked? He suggested it would have to be something deeply dramatic and immediate, like “Manhattan going under water.”

“Apollo did not require changing human behavior” as fighting climate change would, through the need for measures like carbon taxes or changes in consumption patterns.

One more important difference between sending people to the moon and solving a problem like climate change was cited in a recent editorial in the journal Nature, which noted that attempts to counter climate change have lobbyists fighting against them

“Just because a metaphor is not exact,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not useful.”

The deceptively simple goal, he said, should be to “decarbonize electricity, and then electrify everything.”

mostly, he said, it will require a shift in national attitude.“The moon shot technology we need is political will.”

That would involve building up renewable energy and dropping electrical generation from fossil fuel plants, and building up the use of technologies like heat pumps that can make home heating and cooling more efficient

Could a “moon shot” for climate change cool a warming planet?

But President Kennedy did not have to convince people that the moon existed

So might Hallam’s plan to replace the government with a Citizens’ Assembly, a group of randomly selected citizens, which he argues would be more democratic and more responsive to the climate crisis than the status quo.

French President Emmanuel Macron just promised to give 150 randomly chosen people the power to set the policy agenda on cutting carbon emissions. In the UK, 110 people will take part in an assembly to decide on policies for achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

we can no longer rely on incremental reforms, like those advocated by most environmental nonprofits

You’ve got to understand, it’s like we’ve gone to the doctor and he’s told us we’ve got terminal cancer. We need to reduce carbon emissions in a matter of months and years, not decades. We need to change governments’ actions very quickly.

Yes, 3.5 percent is the average of what we’ve needed in uprisings since 1900.

This is too important for it to be about political ideology or ego. But people have been doing climate marches for more than 30 years. It doesn’t work because no one is losing money or reputation. The most effective way to do that is breaking the law and going to prison.

“There is mounting pressure on companies from investors, regulators, customers, and employees to demonstrate their resilience to rising climate volatility. Scientific advances mean that climate risks can now be modelled with greater accuracy and incorporated into risk management and business plans.

“Biologically diverse ecosystems capture vast amounts of carbon and provide massive economic benefits that are estimated at $33tn (£25tn) per year – the equivalent to the GDP of the US and China combined. It’s critical that companies and policymakers move faster to transition to a low carbon economy and more sustainable business models.

“We are already seeing companies destroyed by failing to align their strategies to shifts in policy and customer preferences. Transitionary risks are real, and everyone must play their part to mitigate them. It’s not just an economic imperative, it is simply the right thing to do,” he said.

This volcanism-induced warming, far-removed from the extinction, casts blame squarely on the Chicxulub event. “I’m sure the debate will rage on, because there are entrenched voices on either side,” Dr. Brusatte said. “But it’s getting harder and harder to fathom that the asteroid was innocent.”

voters may hold him and his administration accountable for brushing aside scientific experts and failing to effectively mobilize the government to minimize natural disasters that have claimed lives, damaged property and threatened economic prosperity.

“Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles, a supporter of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said

“As an historic figure, he is one of the most culpable men in America contributing to the suffering and death that is now occurring through climate-related tragedy,” Jerry Brown, the former California governor

The president’s record is also more consequential, experts say, because the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere has now passed the point at which scientists say it would be possible to avert many of the worst effects of global warming — even if tough emissions policies are later enacted.

“In both cases, there is no plan to deal with crisis,” he added.

He said Mr. Trump had put in place “common sense policies that have kept our air, water and environment clean.”

At the event in front of supporters in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Trump declared himself “a great environmentalist.”

The report is clear about the causes — burning fossil fuels — and the effects: It found that the increased drought, flooding, storms and worsening wildfires caused by the warming planet could shrink the American economy by up to 10 percent by the end of the century.

he said of global warming, “I don’t know that it’s man-made,” and suggested that even as the planet warmed, “it will change back again” — an idea scientists have long debunked.

And Mr. Trump’s first appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, declared early in his tenure that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement starkly at odds with the scientific consensus.

the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.

Taken together, those rules represented the country’s first significant step toward reducing greenhouse gases, while putting the world’s largest economy at the forefront of the global effort to fight climate change.Now they are in shambles.

If Mr. Biden is elected, he has vowed to rejoin the Paris agreement and reinstate those rules, while pushing to enact even stronger policies, spending up to $2 trillion to promote the development of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.

In Europe renewable energy prompted something almost as wrenching for a different sort of energy firm—utilities. Faced with an existential threat from wind and solar, fossil-fuel power producers such as Germany’s E.ON and RWE tore themselves apart, redesigned their businesses, and emerged cleaner and stronger.

Southern European firms like Spain’s Iberdrola and Italy’s Enel took renewables worldwide. Last year total shareholder returns from the reinvigorated European utilities left the oil-and-gas industry in the dust.

Some giants, like ExxonMobil and Chevron in America, continue to bet most heavily on oil

Others, among them Europe’s supermajors, Royal Dutch Shell, Total and BP, increasingly favour natural gas, and see low-carbon (though not necessarily zero-carbon) power generation as a way to prop up their business model as more cars and other things begin to run on electricity.

of a whopping $80bn or so of capital expenditure by Europe’s seven biggest listed energy firms last year, only 7.4%—less than $1bn each on average—went to clean energy.

capital spending on renewable energy, power grids and batteries will need to rise globally to $1.2trn a year on average from now until 2050, more than double the $500bn spent each year on oil and gas.

To help fund that, it reckons that oil-and-gas companies will need to divert $10trn of investments away from fossil fuels over the same period.

For now, oil executives show no appetite for such a radical change of direction. If anything, they are working their oil-and-gas assets harder, to skim the profits and hand them to shareholders while they still can. Oil, they say, generates double-digit returns on capital employed. Clean energy, mere single digits.

Big Oil has ways to make other high-risk, high-reward bets on clean energy. One is through venture capital. The OIES calculates that of 200 recent investments by the oil majors, 70 have been in clean-energy ventures, such as electric-vehicle charging networks. They have generally been small for now. But BP reportedly plans to build five $1bn-plus “unicorns” over the next five years with an aim of providing more energy with lower emissions

Another way is to back research and development in potentially groundbreaking technologies such as high-altitude wind energy, whose generating efficiency promises equally lofty profits.

As national climate commitments grow more stringent, governments may go on the warpath. UBS argues that it may be necessary for governments to “ban” the $10trn of oil-and-gas investments to reach net zero emissions by 2050

No one, not entrepreneurs nor Whitehall officials, can predict the state of the energy sector in 30 years’ time.

But discussions over the cost are almost irrelevant because centralising all these decisions will shut down the market discovery process, meaning we’ll never know if cheaper, better routes were available.

We still don’t have a clear estimate from the government on the cost of reaching net zero by 2050, though the Office for Budget Responsibility put the total cost at £1.4 trillion in July. The Treasury this week warned UK households and businesses face the prospect of new taxes in the coming years to help meet the targe

Rather than gazing into a crystal ball, his officials would abandon their obsession with specific choices or sectors.

opportunity costs affect economic activity in unseen ways. Money spent on pumps today is money that cannot be spent on hydrogen boilers tomorrow, which may be a better solution. Jobs filled in green sectors are jobs unfilled elsewhere.

Perhaps Johnson should come down on the side of a border-adjusted carbon tax. It arguably offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the speed and scale necessary.

there’s no indication so far that anything this reasonable will replace current decision-making.

Support may soon give way to hostility if government remains stubbornly committed to its current approach.

The idea that, if we are to halt climate change then we need to start doing things differently, is no longer a fringe view.

If you believe that climate change is a boutique issue prioritized only by out-of-touch liberal elites, as one poll found, then this bill, should it pass, represents a political achievement of astonishing magnitude: the triumph of a moral crusade against long odds.

if you believe there is quite a lot of public support for climate action, as other polls suggest — then this bill marks the success of outsider activists in holding establishment forces to account, both to their own rhetoric and to the demands of their voters.

whatever your read of public sentiment, what is most striking about the news this week is not just that there is now some climate action on the table but also how fast the landscape for climate policy has changed, shifting all of our standards for success and failure along with it

The bill may well prove inadequate, even if it passes. It also represents a generational achievement — achieved, from the point of view of activists, in a lot less time than a full generation.

None of this is exclusively the work of the climate left

To trust the math of its architects, this deal between Manchin and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, splits the difference — the United States won’t be leading the pack on decarbonization, but it probably won’t be seen by the rest of the world as a laughingstock or climate criminal, either.

Technological progress has driven the cost of renewable energy down so quickly, it should now seem irresistible to anyone making long-term policy plans or public investments. There has been rapid policy innovation among centrists and policy wonks, too, dramatically expanding the climate tool kit beyond carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems to what has been called a whole-of-government approach to decarbonizing.

They got their wish. And as a result, we got a bill. That’s not naïveté but the opposite.

as the political scientist Matto Mildenberger has pointed out, the legislation hadn’t failed at the ballot box; it had stalled on Manchin’s desk

He also pointed to research showing climate is driving the voting behavior of Democrats much more than it is driving Republicans into opposition and that most polling shows high levels of baseline concern about warming and climate policy all across the country. (It is perhaps notable that as the Democrats were hashing out a series of possible compromises, there wasn’t much noise about any of them from Republicans, who appeared to prefer to make hay about inflation, pandemic policy and critical race theory.)

It is hard not to talk about warming without evoking any fear, but the president was famous, on the campaign trail and in office, for saying, “When I think ‘climate change,’ I think ‘jobs.’”

He focused on green growth and the opportunities and benefits of a rapid transition.

In the primaries, Sunrise gave Biden an F for his climate plan, but after he sewed up the nomination, its co-founder Varshini Prakash joined his policy task force to help write his climate plan. As the plan evolved and shrank over time, there were squeaks and complaints here and there but nothing like a concerted, oppositional movement to punish the White House for its accommodating approach to political realities.

over the past 18 months, since the inauguration, whenever activists chose to protest, they were almost always protesting not the inadequacy of proposed legislation but the worrying possibility of no legislation at all

When they showed up at Manchin’s yacht, they were there to tell him not that they didn’t want his support but that they needed him to act. They didn’t urge Biden to throw the baby out with the bathwater; they were urging him not to.

When, last week, they thought they’d lost, Democratic congressional staff members staged an unprecedented sit-in at Schumer’s office, hoping to pressure the Senate majority leader back into negotiations with Manchin. And what did they say? They didn’t say, “We have eight years to save the earth.” They didn’t say, “The blood of the future is on your hands.” What their protest sign said was “Keep negotiating, Chuck.” As far as I can tell, this was code for “Give Joe more.”

The present-day climate left was effectively born, in the United States, with the November 2018 Sunrise Movement sit-in. At the time, hardly anyone on the planet had heard of Greta Thunberg, who had just begun striking outside Swedish Parliament — a lonely, socially awkward 15-year-old holding up a single sign. Not four years later, her existential rhetoric is routinely echoed by presidents and prime ministers and C.E.O.s and secretaries general, and more than 80 percent of the world’s economic activity and emissions are now, theoretically, governed by net-zero pledges pointing the way to a carbon-neutral future in just decades.

The deal, if it holds, is very big, several times as large as anything on climate the United States passed into law before. The architects and supporters of the $369 billion in climate and clean-energy provisions in Joe Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, announced Wednesday, are already calculating that it could reduce American carbon emissions by 40 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by 2030. That’s close enough to President Biden’s pledge of 50 percent that exhausted advocates seem prepared to count it as a victory

The economy that Hickel envisions would cease to pursue growth, green or otherwise. Materials and energy will still be consumed, and waste generated, but at much lower levels. All impacts on the natural world will be tethered to the question, “Growth for whom, and to what ends?” In place of an individualistic consumer economy, Hickel’s post-growth economy would direct itself toward the creation of public goods that allow the many to live well—mass transit, health care—rather than to keep a few in luxury.

A growing body of research reveals an inverse relationship between “happiness” and growth beyond a certain point.

In the rich countries, general contentment peaked in 1950, when GDP and real per capita incomes were fractions of their present size (and inequality near modern historic lows); degrowthers posit that similar happiness levels will be reclaimed on the way back down the economic mountain

Hickel describes a post-growth economy defined by stability and equality, and the freedom and leisure possible when the economy is no longer subservient to the god of growth

He estimates that the U.S. economy could be scaled down by as much as 65 percent while still improving the lives of its citizens. This includes the metric most often tied to celebrations of endless growth: life expectancy.

degrowth will entail a steep reduction across a much wider range of high-energy consumer goods. Keeping a global economy within safe ecological limits is a zero-sum game.

When limited resources are directed toward clean energy infrastructure, public health care, and regenerative agriculture, it will still be possible to build and power modern 24-hour hospitals in every city, but not to have Xbox consoles, two-car garages, and giant appliances in every home.

would have to redefine it, too.

The post-growth economy could not succeed solely by redistributing wealth; it would have to redefine it, too.

He argues that short-term growth would have to continue in those countries that have still not achieved the basic levels of sanitation, infrastructure, and education needed for a decent standard of living, to close the gap. Their larger goal, meanwhile, would be to break free from their historical role as a source of natural resources and cheap labor for the north.

For degrowth to be just, global, and effective, the sharpest reduction in consumption will have to come from the north, where the greatest damage to the planet is currently being done

Ecological economists generally agree that the safe outer limit is eight tons

One person in a low-income country has a materials footprint of roughly two tons per year, a measure of total raw materials consumed, including those embodied in imports. In lower-middle–income countries, that number is four tons; in upper-middle–income countries, 12 tons. In the high-income nations of North America, Europe, and Asia, the number leaps to 28

The wealthiest 20 percent of the human population is responsible for 90 percent of “overshoot” carbon in the atmosphere (that is, a level of carbon that exceeds the limit needed to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius)

The planet’s richest one percent has a carbon footprint twice the size of the poorest half of the world’s population combined

For the global north, degrowth not only starts at home, it starts with the biggest houses.

Less Is More doesn’t end in a poetic appreciation for nature’s majesty, but by teasing out its implications for the political project of preserving a habitable planet. Hickel devotes much of the book to explaining that degrowth must be central to this project, promising not just survival, but real democracy, social abundance, and liberation.

Both involve broad social shifts away from private consumption and toward the production of shared public goods.

This beautiful coincidence overlaps with policy programs like the Green New Deal in important way

In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take public transit more, value community over material things, and buy bonds to fund domestic energy development, including solar

Next to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics,” Debsian socialism was reformist tinkering. Schumacher didn’t see liberation as a matter of reshuffling the ownership and management structures of the smokestack-powered growth economy. He believed a deeper transformation was needed to maintain a livable planet. This would require new socioecological blueprints “designed for permanence.” As the left and the right battled for control over growth’s levers and spoils, Schumacher pointed out how both had become blind to the rise of growth as its own self-justifying, pan-ideological religion; its patterns of production and consumption, he observed, required “a degree of violence” that did not “fit into the laws of the universe.”

They determined that infinite growth was, in fact, impossible on a finite planet. Barring a major course correction, the team projected, growthism would result in an ecological systems breakdown sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century

This warning, detailed in the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, has aged better than the scorn heaped on it

We are now witnessing what appears to be the beginnings of the collapse predicted nearly 50 years ago

In his new book, Less Is More, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist and journalist, attempts to bring a comprehensive critique of growth closer to the center of the conversation, arguing through a sweeping history of capitalism that it’s uncontrolled growth, not its controlled arrest and reversal, that is the preposterous concept.

This economic and political revolution was reinforced by a complementary scientific one that displaced the lingering animist cosmology of pre-capitalist Europe. The dualism of Francis Bacon and Descartes held reason to be distinct from and superior to matter.

The idea of limitless growth is a relatively recent one. In Less Is More, Hickel traces its origins to the enclosure of the European commons in the sixteenth century

Starving refugees were scattered and forced into a new economy defined by neo-feudal servitude and wage labor. Landowners, meanwhile, began amassing great stores of surplus wealth.

By the mid-1800s, a new “science” had arisen from these assumptions. Neoclassical economics fully abstracted the economy from the natural world. The economy was geared not toward the creation of a happy and prosperous society, but toward the perpetual growth of wealth as its own end, achieved in an inherently virtuous cycle of converting labor and resources into capital, to be accumulated and reinvested in faster and more productive conversions of labor and resources

This ideology subsumed and profaned notions about progress and morality held by the classical economists, until eventually the field even l

This process unfolded despite repeated warnings along the way. Classical economists like John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith not only acknowledged the existence of natural limits to growth, but saw economic development as a phase; at some point, they believed, nations would create enough wealth to pursue other definitions of progres

the caveats issued by Simon Kuznets, father of the concept adopted in the twentieth century as growth’s universal and signature metric: gross domestic product. Kuznets, Hickel points out, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress,” because GDP does not distinguish between productive and destructive behavior

Most people encounter the growth debate, if they encounter it at all, through the idea of “green growth.

This is a vision for our collective future based on the belief that technological advance will drastically reduce the amount of raw materials needed to sustain growth—a process known as dematerialization—and “decouple” growing GDP from its ecological impacts.

boosters of the idea point to the transition by rich countries from manufacturing to service-based economies, as well as efficiency gains in energy and in the use of materials

The belief that green growth will save us, also known as “ecomodernism” or “ecopragmatism,” has become a trendy article of faith among elites who acknowledge climate change and the dangers of breaching ecological boundaries

n 2017, Barack Obama threw his support behind the idea in an article for Science magazine, maintaining that signs of decoupling in major economies “should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.”

The argument that capitalism can grow itself out of the present crisis may be soothing to those who like the world as it is. It also relies on the kind of accounting tricks and rejection of reality

By only counting the emissions created within a country that imports most of its cars, washing machines, and computers, you end up pushing the emissions related to their production off the books. When you factor them back in, the picture is much less green. A number of recent studies show no evidence of meaningful decoupling—in energy or materials—even as the world increases its use of renewable energy and finds ways to use some materials more efficiently.

Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent “fairy tale.”

consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years

he economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200.

Hickel is less interested in the macroeconomic details of this future than are growth critics based in economics departments, like Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth, and more focused on the leisure, security, and general human flourish

he makes an alluring case that degrowth does not require anything like the “command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment.”

Attaining the benefits of the post-growth economy would, however, require what the present consumer society considers “sacrifices.

it’s not clear how many of them are ready to give up its superficial pleasures enabled by consumer debt

Among nations, there’s also the question of fairness: Wouldn’t it be unjust to impose degrowth across the world, when it’s disproportionately the countries of the global north that have spent centuries burning through the planet’s resources?

This output tracks to the one percent’s share of global wealth—a number equal to the GDP of the bottom 169 countries.

Even if you accept the argument that inequality would be best addressed by more centuries of trickle-down growth, you keep running up against the simple fact of its impossibility. Even just one more century of growth—which so far has shown no sign of taking a less destructive form—will require multiple earths

Hickel is serious about bringing the system critiques of E.F. Schumacher and others out of their traditional cloisters and into the streets, and has sought allies in this effort

emphasize what Hickel calls the “beautiful coincidence” of degrowth: that “what we need to do to survive is the same as what we need to do to have better lives.”

Both are internationalist in outlook, and see the world through a lens of climate justice as well as climate equilibrium.

that is, communicating the many benefits of moving beyond the insecurity and terrors of the current system, and building a new society that is sustainable, stable, democratic, and fundamentally better in every way.

The federal government encouraged this practice from the start. The Timber Culture Act passed in 1873, permitted homesteaders to claim an additional 160 acres of free land by planting trees on at least a quarter of it. Decades later, desperate to curb the Dust Bowl, President Franklin Roosevelt channeled roughly $14 million — mostly via emergency relief and the Works Progress Administration — to the Prairie States Forestry Project, resulting in nearly 19,000 miles of windbreaks throughout the Great Plains, many of them composed of Eastern redcedar.

Still today, the Department of Agriculture subsidizes the planting of redcedar for everything from windbreaks to wildlife habitat. State programs provide similar cost-share programs, and it’s from all of these plantings (and more) the spread — or the “encroachment,” as ecologists call it — generally begins.

In 2018, the rangeland ecologist Dirac Twidwell and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska began the Eastern Redcedar Science Literacy Project to catalog the fallout

Eastern redcedar can transform a thriving tallgrass prairie into a closed canopy woodland in just 40 years. In the process, critical biodiversity is evicted from the landscape. The majority of grassland bird species are no longer present where Eastern redcedar cover exceeds just 10 percent of land cover. Beyond 30 percent, most small mammals vanish, too. And as too many ranchers and other land managers can now attest, both forage production and plant diversity take a nosedive in the Green Glacier’s wake.

Allergies. Wildfires. Tick-borne disease. All of these problems climb while stream flow and groundwater recharge rates often decline. True, a juniper woodland sequesters more carbon. But the grassland it muscled out was a more reliable carbon sink, storing more than 90 percent of its capture underground, safe from wildfires that would send that carbon into the atmosphere. From virtually every angle — environmental or economic, livestock or literature, air quality or landscape aesthetics — the Green Glacier is a problem.

“The Great Plains biome is dying,” Dr. Twidwell said. “Losing grasslands at this scale is akin to losing tropical rainforests or coral reefs.”

for decades now, discussion about the Green Glacier has been largely relegated to the dusty confines of trade journals and agricultural conventions. Perhaps this is because the vast majority of our remaining grasslands are privately owned. Perhaps, as our forests burn and our levees break, there is little sympathy left for the livestock industry, responsible for roughly 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — never mind the many effects of tree encroachment that bleed far beyond the ranch.

If America wants to preserve what’s left of Cather’s spiritual homeland, something greater than what Dr. Twidwell calls “postage-stamp prairies,” then “the clock is ticking,”

The good news is that prescribed fire, where done repeatedly, has proved to effectively halt the Green Glacier’s spread. In fact, the Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance, a group of neighboring landowners in southwestern Nebraska, is one of the first documented groups to halt the encroachment on a regional scale.

At some point, too, the public might look up and notice that subsidizing EVs is having no effect on climate or CO2.

the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Arab oil embargo in the latest edition of New Atlantis: “The worst effect was on U.S. energy policy. Whereas the embargo lasted about five months, the toll on U.S. policy has lasted five decades and counting.”

the 50-year-old fuel-economy regime devolved into a convoluted set of political trade-offs serving—as the Biden administration recently admitted—no legitimate cost-benefit goal. Boondoggles from synfuels to corn ethanol were launched in the 1970s to honor the false god of energy independence, though thanks to the still-functioning genius of the free-market system the U.S. nevertheless blundered into true energy security with the help of fracking.

The words “energy transition” are redundant. The energy economy is always transitioning. The transitions are additive. Wind, hydro and biomass all existed before fossil fuels arrived

Energy’s uses are unlimited. This is why, unless the world improbably adopts a carbon tax, the effect of green-energy subsidies (aside from enriching their backers) is largely to stimulate increased energy consumption rather than reduce CO2. This effect is already apparent in the numbers.

another ’70s legacy: our least-useful professors invoking big-oil stereotypes in pursuit of political goals.

Witness a New York Times op-ed this week combining adventurous antitrust reasoning with tired anti-Exxon tropes, claiming a proposed oil merger represents a “direct threat to democracy” by somehow blocking a solution to climate change that voters apparently crave even though it doesn’t exist.

Exxon controls less than 3% of the world’s oil and gas, most of which are in the hands of governments. The U.S. is responsible for less than 15% of global CO2 emissions.

What older Americans remember as the oil crisis was a product of domestic price controls, imposed by people in the Nixon administration who knew better.

Along the way, the country did manage to remove lead from gasoline and mandate catalytic converters, which improved air quality, showing that rational, economical policy outcomes are still possible amid the vast politicized waste that “energy policy” has otherwise become in the last 50 years.

A higher proportion of young people also believe that urgent action is required to deal with climate change.

nearly 90 per cent of the over-65s say they recycle as much as possible compared with only half of young people.

Retired Britons are also three times more likely than younger people to have installed energy-saving measure

The over-65s are also more likely to have reduced the number of flights they take, to take steps to save water, to repair items, to wash clothes at low temperatures and to choose a renewable energy tariff.

cross the population as a whole, 12 per cent of people say they are vegan or vegetarian.

young people have a long way to go to live up to their reputation as being concerned for the planet.

There are some areas where 18 to 24-year-olds are doing more than older people, however. Young people are more likely to walk or cycle than older people

and they are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan.

17 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds do not eat any meat compared with only 8 per cent of the over-65s

They are also more likely to turn the heating down and switch off lights in rooms they are not using.

Half of people questioned said that dealing with the cost of living is a greater priority than making changes to lower their environmental impact.

The largest previous assessment of methane emissions from oil and gas in the United States, published in 2018, reviewed studies covering about 1,000 well sites, a tiny fraction of the more than one million active wells in the country. The new study, by contrast, used aerial data to examine nearly 27,000 sites from above: more than 90 percent of all wells in the New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin, which also extends into Texas.

estimated about a decade ago that the break-even point — the point above which natural gas would actually hurt the climate more than coal — was a 3.1 percent methane leakage rate. Based on more recent data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Howarth estimates that the threshold is closer to 2.8 or 2.9 percent.That makes the 9.4 percent leakage rate in the new study highly alarming,

Methane can be released by wells both on purpose, in a process known as venting, and through unintentional leaks from aging or faulty equipment.

Natural gas accounts for about a third of American energy consumption, and because it is less costly than coal in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, many policymakers have promoted it as a “bridge” that could do less damage to the climate while society works on a longer-term transition to renewable energy. But compared to coal, natural gas results in much higher emissions of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere.

They found that a small number of wells and pipelines accounted for “the vast majority” of methane leaks, Ms. Chen said, adding, “Comprehensive point source surveys find more high-consequence emission events, which drive total emissions.”

If there was good news in the study, it was that a small number of oil and gas sites contributed disproportionately to emissions — suggesting that, if the worst offenders change their practices, it is possible for the industry to operate more cleanly.

The Stanford researchers emphasized that the same methodology they used to quantify methane emissions could be used to identify problem sites and target regulations accordingly.“Aerial technology found high methane emissions,” Ms. Chen said, “but can also help fix them cost effectively.”