Fwd: And so "climate" returns
Loretta Lohman
One benefit of having watched the climate story from the start is that I tend not to panic when “climate” is temporarily eclipsed as an issue, almost always thanks to the hard work of Big Oil. It happened at the end of the 1980s after the initial furor over the newly public “greenhouse effect,” and again after the Kyoto climate talks; when Al Gore made global warming a central issue in the oughts, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks put it on the back burner. Many of us built the movement that pushed it back to the front again in the oughts, culminating in the Paris accords; when momentum wavered Greta Thunberg and her colleagues emerged, building the consensus that took us through the IRA. At the moment, of course, a resurgent fossil-funded right wing has killed off that landmark legislation, and done all it can to destroy clean energy in the U.S.; America is out of the global climate talks; around the world various strongmen have made protest far more difficult. The new authoritarians have managed to intimidate many of the centrist pols in much of the world who are no longer willing to talk much about “climate;” indeed, there’s a closet industry of pundits and consultants advising them not to. But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world. Honestly, it would be nifty if people who can afford it without undue strain would take out a voluntary and modestly priced subscription to this newsletter. You don’t get anything extra, just my thanks. The politics of climate begins with…climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heat wave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that
Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes
But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to the Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks. Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm,
In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News
I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse. Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK. But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is putting big money behind the rightwing Reform Party, which according to an April investigation by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett, has collected two-thirds of its funding from oil interests. Together with the always vile Murdoch press, they’ve mounted a full-on attack on “Net Zero” policies, alleging—a la Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in this country—that they’re responsible for rising energy prices in the UK. The entire status quo is in on this fight—including British labor unions. They aren’t venal the way oil companies are, but they are fighting against change, in the name of their current members. And they’ve focused their fire on Milliband. Sharon Graham, head of the giant UNITE union, has said
Happily, we’re starting to see serious pushback to this endless irresponsible climate delayism. It begins with scientists. In France eminent climate researchers have started speaking out to Le Monde, complaining about the inability of scientists to effectively connect the dots between climate change and heat for the public. British scientists have gone one better: nine of them wrote the agency responsible for regulating the press to complain about the lame coverage.
I think my favorite was a letter to the London Times from the veteran climate research Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, which I reprint here just because I like its cadences:
The sentence “net zero is not an arbitrary slogan, rather it is dictated by the laws of physics” should be a watchword in the years to come. And here’s my guess: Milliband will be vindicated, landing in an important new job. Despite the complaints of union leaders, Britain’s green economy is one of the few things that’s booming on the island. He’s not backing down: at a press conference last week he heralded the fact that more than a hundred billion pounds in private clean energy investments had been made during his term.
Indeed, forty progressive economists in the UK wrote to the labor leaders this week, rejecting their attack on Net Zero.
If Burnham were to back off the Net Zero pledges, he’d be disappointing the sixty percent of Brits who like the strategy. Starmer staggered in part because he took rightwing positions on immigration, giving the Green Party an opening; that door will grow much larger if he backs off on climate policy, so I suspect he won’t. And the heatwave will give him political cover to do the right thing. As the head of Greenpeace UK said last week
My further guess is that the coming El Niño will have the same effect on global climate politics—and maybe even in our caboose of a nation. We enter this new warming spell in rough shape: recent data shows the heat content of oceans at all-time highs. Things are grim enough that one (ghoulish?) investor has launched a fund designed to make money off the coming crisis
American politicians may feel that the easiest course for the short term is to back off on climate talk—and the green movement is perhaps inclined to let them get away with it through the midterm elections, which will be fought largely as a referendum on the mendacity of the Trump administration. (Though it’s political malpractice not to be calling out Trump’s incredibly unpopular attacks on solar and wind energy). But next year, as primary season begins in earnest, El Niño will insure climate is firmly back on the agenda. And given the explosion in clean energy, the case will be easy for smart candidates to make. That this cycle has gone on since the 1980s does not mean it can go on forever. We’re clearly reaching desperate physical tipping points. So this had better be the last turn of the wheel—by the end of the decade we need to have decisively broken the political power of the fossil fuel industry, so we can get on with the energy transition, and with building a world that can survive the damage Big Oil has inflicted. It starts now. In other energy and climate news: +From Michael Coren, a fascinating column about emerging new models for affordable solar leasing schemes.
Meanwhile Jeff St. John describes how Sunrun, Tesla and RenewHome are teaming up to make a really big virtual power plant out of all those home batteries. The three companies Wednesday
+Climate activist and writer Mike Tidwell’s recent book The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue will be part of a novel PBS series called “Sacred Ground with Tim Daly” that focuses on the heroic work of several North American climate activists. Episode two stays true to Tidwell’s chronicle of the impacts of climate change on his one DC-area street, from dying trees to Lyme disease to constant flooding. It also captures the inspiring work of people fighting back like Tidwell’s neighbor and climate activist Congressman Jamie Raskin. (You can also see some very vintage footage of…me.) +Hannah Story Brown has an epic account of the epically foolish plan to build a new LNG pipeline 800 miles across the middle of Alaska
+Meanwhile, you know what actually makes money? Windpower. Here’s Paul Lovell’s update from Iowa, center of the midwestern breeze belt:
Nova Scotia seems to have gotten the message, and is betting big on wind—not just to supply its one million residents, but to export power to the States, where Trump is preventing eastern seaboard states from setting up wind farms of their own. Emma Graney reports
+Great news from France, where a court has ruled that the fossil giant TotalEnergies is responsible for the emissions from its customers burning its products, a kind of liability the oil majors have done their best to dodge.
+New from Jason Dove Mark, a fascinating book about shifting baselines, and how they skew our sense of change. I just got to spend a few wonderful days with Jeremey Jackson, the ocean scientist who first popularized the concept; I’m glad it’s getting more and more attention. +A new kind of travel show, that doesn’t burn any jet fuel. Check out Parke Wilde’s “Adventures of the Not Jet Set.” I hope everyone is enjoying some low-carbon adventure—my mantra is, despite all the damage this remains a beautiful world, and one of our jobs is to simply witness its beauty. It’s a task I take seriously! I’ll leave you with a picture I took last week at Shelburne Farms, one of Vermont’s most beautiful places. I was giving a talk there, but took a stroll beforehand, gazing out across Lake Champlain at my beloved Adirondacks. Sometimes people ask how I keep going year after year in this work, and this is a big part of the answer
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2026 Bill McKibben
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