COP26 in Glasgow, featuring the Panama delegation
COP26: Pop-up bureaucracy. Frantic slog. Squasher of ambition and optimism. If the scientific data doesn’t floor you, then the torpor might: the repetitive ideas, the numbing speeches, the old men. The largest delegation at the conference is not India's or China's or that of the United States; it is the stealth consortium of fossil fuel lobbyists who like the world the way it is. (Nov. 14, 2021)
Obama, playing ‘hype man,’ tries to jolt COP26
Referring to himself as a “private citizen,” Obama was received at COP26 like a head of state, drawing more onlookers in the conference complex than Prince Charles and inspiring standing ovations at the start and end of his speech. Obama was informal in demeanor and skipped the tie for his charcoal suit, but his message was all business: He chided China and Russia for skipping the conference, reminded attendees of his own work on climate change and emphasized that “time really is running out” to avert the worst consequences of a warming planet. (Nov. 8, 2021)
The year 2050 loomed large in New York this week, on the trashed ancestral lands of the Lenape tribes, who were invoked at multiple events. The weather was gorgeous, but the atmosphere alternated between hot and cold: People rejoiced in solidarity in the middle of First Avenue, got drunk in Chelsea while toasting “asset tokenization platforms” that will somehow save the rainforest, sobbed into the arms of strangers in a midtown session titled “Expressing Climate Grief.” In the basement theater at Alvin Ailey, dancers performed “Glacier: A Climate Change Ballet” by D.C. choreographer Diana Movius. They rushed like meltwater, slapped the ground like calving glaciers, died at the lip of the stage like desperate polar bears. (Sept. 27, 2019)
We watched all seven hours of CNN’s climate town hall so you didn’t have to
What will a historian in the 22nd century learn about our country, our age, by unearthing video of CNN’s town hall on the climate crisis? She will learn that candidates for our highest office, centuries after the Enlightenment, still had to declare publicly that they believe in science. She will learn that these candidates also believe that climate change is a paramount threat that must be confronted immediately, but in an incremental way. (Sept. 5, 2019)
How should we talk about what’s happening to our planet?
The climate problem is not just scientific. It’s linguistic. If we can agree how to talk and write about an issue that affects us all, maybe we can understand and fix it together. (Aug. 27, 2019)
One of America’s top climate scientists is an evangelical Christian
You might say that the climate problem, while understood through science, can be solved only through faith.
Faith in one another.
Faith in our ability to do something bold, together.
Faith that the pain of change, that the sacrifices required, will lead to a promised land. (July 15, 2019)
At the first Democratic debate, can the climate candidate get a word in?
This city shouldn’t really be here, but it is, and the governor of Washington state shouldn’t really be here, but he was. The two have something to do with each other. Wednesday morning Jay Inslee was 11 floors up a sparkling new high-rise that sits on land that used to be water, and may be water again. (June 27, 2019)
A Green New Deal ignites an old Red scare
Over the past century as the United States unleashed and then grappled with its own superpower, Americans have fought over how big our Big Problems are. Faced with economic depression or systemic racism or threats to public health, politicians have proposed turning the ship of state by ushering everyone to one side while the government throws its weight against the wheel. And when they do, other politicians start talking about socialism… (May 8, 2019)
Al Gore is near the end of his quest to save the Earth. Nina Barrett just got started.
When Albert Gore Jr. reaches his 80s, Nina Simone Barrett will be midway through her 30s, and there will be more than 8 billion people on Earth. When she is in her 40s, a flooding event like Hurricane Sandy could threaten New York once every five years. When she is in her 50s, Charleston, S.C., will be experiencing 16 times more tidal floods. This century, her century, the American Southeast is expected to warm up by 8 degrees Fahrenheit. (April 1, 2019)
Butterflies were symbols of rebirth. Then they started disappearing.
Late last month, there was a meeting in the Putah Creek Lodge on the campus of the University of California at Davis. The topic was the western population of monarch butterflies, the ones that winter on the California coast. Their numbers had dropped 86 percent over the past year, to 0.6 percent of their historical average. This was a problem. (May 8, 2019)
‘Everything is not going to be okay’
And so there is no crisis, just an accumulation of curiosities and irritants. Your basement now floods every year instead of every five or 10 years. Your asthma has gotten worse. You grew up wearing a winter jacket under your Halloween costume in Buffalo, and now your kids don’t have to. The southern pine beetle that once made its home closer to the equator is now boring through trees on Long Island. (Jan. 24, 2019)