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To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency, a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.
While April and May are usually the hottest months in many countries in Southeast Asia, hundreds of millions of people are now suffering in South Asia from an exceptionally intense heatwave that has killed hundreds. One expert has already called it the most extreme heat event in history. Record-breaking temperatures above 122°F were reported in the Indian capital of New Delhi, and temperatures sizzled to an unheard of 127°F in parts of India and Pakistan.
Nor was the blazing heat limited to Asia. Heatwaves of exceptional severity and duration are now occurring simultaneously in many areas of the world. Mexico and parts of the United States, notably Miami and Phoenix, have recently been in the grip of intense heat events. In southern Mexico, endangered howler monkeys in several states have been falling dead from trees in their tropical forests due to heat stroke and dehydration. Below-average rainfall throughout Mexico has led to water shortages in Mexico City and elsewhere. In some places, birds and bats, not to speak of humans, are also dying from the heat.
All of this is no coincidence. The hot and heavy hand of climate change is now upon us. Last year was the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years, and the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was the highest in 4 million years and still climbing at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures also reached a peak, causing severe massive coral bleaching in all three major ocean basins.
Had a foreign enemy inflicted the kind of damage caused by such floods, or the firestorms that swept California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the U.S. would have immediately mobilized for war.
The World Bank is projecting that, by 2050, there will be more than 200 million climate refugees, 20 times the 10 million refugees that have already destabilized Europe. Climate change is also putting an increasingly heavy burden on our social safety net, which could ultimately cause social order to begin to break down, generating chaos.
Nobel Prize-winning former Energy Secretary Steven Chu now claims it’s no longer possible to keep the global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C above the historical average, as the 195-nation signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had hoped. In fact, he projects that the target of 2°C will also be broken and that, by 2050 the global temperature will have risen above 3°C. Nor is his pessimism unique. Hundreds of other scientists have recently forecast a strong possibility of hitting 2.5°C, which should hardly be surprising since, for well over 30 years now, global leaders have failed to heed the warnings of climate scientists by moving decisively to phase out fossil fuels and their heat-trapping gases.
What to make of such dire forecasts?
It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the disaster at hand. (Or as famed English poet Samuel Johnson put it centuries ago, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”)
Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40 other nations have already done so, including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be enough. As the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the one that historically has contributed the most legacy greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and thorough clean-energy transition. But at the moment, of course, this country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal—and should former President Donald Trump win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the Biden administration’s rhetoric of climate concern has been strong, in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate leadership to others.
Despite the laudable examples of smaller nations like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Paraguay, and Costa Rica that are already at, or within a percentage point or two, of being 100% powered by clean, renewable energy, the world sorely needs the U.S. as a global role model. To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency—79% of the nation’s energy is now drawn from fossil fuels—a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.
Fortunately, there is a historical precedent for just such a comprehensive mobilization of government and citizenry in dire circumstances: former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and the World War II years provide examples of the scale and intensity of the response needed today to reverse climate change. However, instead of gearing up to produce jobs for the unemployed or planes and tanks for a war, a concerted nationwide industrial effort is needed now to upgrade our electrical grid and produce millions of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, carbon-capture machines, and zero-emission vehicles. All too sadly, this country and the world are now in a situation even more perilous than either the Great Depression or World War II.
Rising seas pose serious threats to major American cities, including Boston, Charleston, Miami, and New York, while, in recent years, millions of acres of the Midwest have been flooded by climate-related extreme weather events. Had a foreign enemy inflicted the kind of damage caused by such floods, or the firestorms that swept California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the U.S. would have immediately mobilized for war. Now, this country needs to do exactly that to face the climate crisis, but (even forgetting the horrifying possibility that Donald Trump could win the coming presidential election and sink any possibility of moving on climate change nationally for years to come) how to get our act together?
As French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his classic 1943 novella, Le Petit Prince, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” In other words, a national climate action plan is urgently needed.
Left to its own devices, without strong public pressure, Congress might basically ignore or fail to enact legislation to implement the results of a National Climate Action Plan, especially if Congress were still controlled by the fossil-fuel-loving Republican Party.
In the Trump years of climate-science denial, any progress in controlling emissions resulted from actions by states, cities, and businesses or institutions. Over the long term, however, climate policy is far too important to be left to a hodgepodge of laws and policies haphazardly applied across some of our 50 states and thousands of cities and businesses. What this country needs is a plan guided by scientific and technical analysis and based on an ambitious but attainable set of greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas. Its point would not be to override the climate agendas of any city, state, or group, or the aspirations of the Green New Deal (House Resolution HR 109). It would simply be to provide a reliable toolkit of measures and policies along with analyses of their costs and benefits—a compass for getting to negative carbon emission as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
This country today has no comprehensive climate action plan that proposes clear, enforceable targets, timelines, and roadmaps for climate protection and restabilization—and it desperately needs one. Call it America’s Energy Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy Future and imagine that it would build on previous authoritative studies, analyzing renewable-energy-generating and distribution technologies in terms of their costs, commercial readiness, resource constraints, and potential efficiency. It would formulate and model competing scenarios with clusters of complementary technologies, each requiring different policies for its implementation.
From such an exercise, Americans would learn how to achieve the greatest greenhouse gas reductions with the most speed and cost-effectiveness, as well as the fewest unwanted impacts, while best meeting this country’s ongoing energy needs. Such a study would also reveal the demands on natural resources of each scenario along with its costs and the manufacturing capacity required.
To build trust and engagement in the final plan, regional advisory councils made up of scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and major stakeholder representatives should be created to offer recommendations on how best to adapt such a plan to conditions in each part of the country. The final policy roadmap would then be designated as the “optimal energy path scenario” for the nation and provided to Congress, so that it could use the findings as a basis for funding and implementing new climate legislation.
Left to its own devices, without strong public pressure, Congress might basically ignore or fail to enact legislation to implement the results of a National Climate Action Plan, especially if Congress were still controlled by the fossil-fuel-loving Republican Party. A Republican stranglehold on Congress and/or the White House would undoubtedly stymie both the creation of a national climate plan and the implementation of its findings, as well as the clean-energy transition it would facilitate.
To prevent such a setback from occurring, a strong popular constituency must be built nationwide capable of exerting powerful pressure on Congress to ensure the creation of a climate plan and the appropriate legislation to make it functional. Otherwise, no matter how sound the PR campaign on its behalf, serious political obstacles would stand in the way of its adoption, even by a Democratic Congress.
Through its lobbying, think tanks, public relations arms, and advertising, the politically and economically powerful fossil-fuel industry has, for decades, blocked meaningful climate legislation in both Democratic and Republican congresses. The creation of a powerful, broad coalition of constituencies—environmental, labor, public health, faith-based, and even progressive elements of the business community—could serve as a popular countervailing force against the mighty fossil-fuel industry. But as a first step, that coalition would need support, guidance, and a common accepted platform both to stand behind and to mobilize the public. The American environmental community could produce that platform. Yet this would not be a simple matter, due to the way that community is siloed, with each major organization catering to its own constituency, interests, and funders.
To create a common consensual vision around which the national climate movement could mobilize, a broad civil society gathering should be convened to attract the leadership of all environmental and climate action groups and set the stage for the National Climate Action Plan. That gathering would, of course, focus on the roadblocks to implementing such a plan and to a swift, national clean-energy transition—and how those roadblocks could be dismantled.
Put all of this together and you would have a nation mobilized against the fossil-fuel industry, ready to create a climate action plan and mobilize Americans in an all-of-society effort on behalf of slashing national carbon emissions in a radical fashion, accelerating a clean-energy transition, and protecting our endangered world. What more could you ask for?
"I'd make this the lead story in every paper and newscast on the planet," said Bill McKibben. "If we don't understand the depth of the climate crisis, we will not act in time."
The average monthly concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by a record 4.7 parts per million between March 2023 and March 2024, according to new data from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
The spike, reported by the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography on Wednesday, reveals "the increasing pace of CO2 addition to the atmosphere by human activities," the university said.
"I'd make this the lead story in every paper and newscast on the planet," author and long-time climate activist Bill McKibbenwrote on social media in response to the news. "If we don't understand the depth of the climate crisis, we will not act in time."
"Human activity has caused CO2 to rocket upwards. It makes me sad more than anything. It's sad what we are doing."
Scientists have been tracking rising CO2 concentrations from Mauna Loa since 1958, and their upward trajectory has come to be known as the "Keeling Curve," named for Charles Keeling, who began the measurements. The curve has become an important symbol of the climate crisis—making visible how the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of vegetation has released more and more CO2 into the atmosphere, where it traps heat from escaping into space and raises global temperatures.
For most of human history, concentrations have hovered around 280ppm, and the curve's first measurement put them at 313. Sixty-five years later, C02 concentrations averaged 419.3 ppm in 2023, a level not seen since 4.3 million years ago when sea levels were around 75 feet higher and parts of today's Arctic tundra were forests. As of Wednesday, the Keeling Curve reported a daily concentration of 426.72 ppm.
The record jump from March 2023 to March 2024 surpasses the last record jump of 4.1 ppm from June 2015 to June 2016.
"We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate," Ralph Keeling, Charles' son who now directs the Scripps CO2 Program, said. "The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels."
The record leaps from both 2015-2016 and 2023-2024 were also influenced by active El Niño events. The El Niño phenomenon increases atmospheric carbon dioxide because it leads to warmer, drier temperatures in the tropics, which decrease vegetation and encourage fires. Atmospheric CO2 levels tend to rise especially quickly toward the end of an El Niño cycle, and last March's CO2 levels were unusually low, leading to a larger gap in the 12-month period.
This year's rate of increase during the current El Niño is significantly larger than the one that took place in 2016. As Scripps explained:
The increase from February 2023 to February of this year was 4.0 ppm, compared to 3.7 for the 2016 El Niño. The increase from January 2023 to January of this year was 3.4 ppm, compared to 2.6 for the 2016 El Niño.
The growth rate from April 2023 to April 2024 dropped to 3.6 ppm, but taking into account the first four months of 2024, the growth rate is well above that for 2016. If this El Niño follows the pattern of the last El Niño, the world might experience a very high growth rate for several more months, Keeling said.
However, any regular climate variations such as El Niño events occur over the longer-term rise in both fossil fuel emissions and greenhouse gas levels.
"The rate of rise will almost certainly come down, but it is still rising and in order to stabilize the climate, you need CO2 level to be falling," Keeling toldThe Guardian. "Clearly, that isn't happening. Human activity has caused CO2 to rocket upwards. It makes me sad more than anything. It's sad what we are doing."
Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First, wrote in response, "We're riding the Venus Express."
The record jump in CO2 concentrations comes as 2023 was the hottest year both on record and in around 100,000 years. Of the 12 months covered by the March 2023 to March 2024 period, 10 of them (June through March) were the hottest of that month on record.
"As these numbers show, we still have a lot of work to do to make meaningful progress in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere," said one NOAA scientist.
The three most critical heat-trapping gases in Earth's atmosphere again reached record levels last year, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday, underscoring the inadequacy of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions amid the worsening climate emergency.
NOAA said the three most important human-caused greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide—"continued their steady climb during 2023."
While the levels of these heat-trapping gases did not rise "quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years," the figures "were in line with the steep increases observed during the past decade."
"We're caught between a rock and a charred place."
Global surface CO2 concentrations averaged 419.3 parts per million (ppm) last year, an increase of 2.8 ppm. It was the 12th straight year in which worldwide CO2 concentrations rose by more than 2 ppm.
Atmospheric methane—which while not as abundant as CO2 is up to 87 times more potent over a 20-year period—increased by 10 parts per billion (ppb) to 1,922.6 ppb, while nitrous oxide rose by 1 ppb to 336.7 ppb.
"As these numbers show, we still have a lot of work to do to make meaningful progress in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere," Vanda Grubišić, director of NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in a statement.
According to NOAA:
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch, when sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7°F higher than in pre-industrial times, and large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.
About half of the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to date have been absorbed at the Earth's surface, divided roughly equally between oceans and land ecosystems, including grasslands and forests. The CO2 absorbed by the world's oceans contributes to ocean acidification, which is causing a fundamental change in the chemistry of the ocean, with impacts to marine life and the people who depend on [it]. The oceans have also absorbed an estimated 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases.
"Methane's decadal spike should terrify us," Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist who heads the Global Carbon Project—which tracks global emissions but wasn't part of the NOAA effort—toldNBC News.
"Fossil fuel pollution is warming natural systems like wetlands and permafrost," Jackson added. "Those ecosystems are releasing even more greenhouse gases as they heat up. We're caught between a rock and a charred place."