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climate action
A Victorious Hamburg Climate Resolution Is a Model of Hope-Fueled People Power
While the current German government is rolling back or even boycotting climate action, Hamburg is showing the world that grassroots climate action is effective.
Nov 09, 2025
“This is a story of pure hope in times of climate roll-backs around the world.”
Young climate activists like Luisa Neubauer, cofounder of Fridays for Future in Hamburg, have good reason to celebrate: The city of Hamburg recently voted in favor of more ambitious climate action. Famously, Hamburg was where the Beatles took off. Now the city has another big project that could take off. Neubauer: “Germany’s second largest city has shown that citizens—after all—demand climate action and are willing to self-organize around a just transition.”
At a time when the climate crisis has seemingly been pushed aside by too many other crises, the decisive win of Hamburg’s “Zukunftsentscheid” (Decision about Our Future) at the ballot box on Sunday, October 12, was a win for a dramatically more ambitious climate action plan for the second-largest city in Germany. While the current German government is rolling back or even boycotting climate action, Hamburg is showing the world that grassroots climate action is effective. The new law will make climate policy more fair, more transparent, and more responsive to the needs of future generations. The result could be used as a blueprint by other cities in Germany and far beyond. American cities are perfectly positioned to adopt a similar plan. After all, Americans are actually much more familiar with ballot initiatives than Germans.
Hamburg’s over 1.9 million residents were asked to vote in favor of a binding referendum to require annual carbon dioxide reduction targets, with the goal of net-zero emissions moved up from 2045 to 2040, and requirements that all climate policies will have to be socially just. A majority of over 303,000 residents, or 53.2%, said yes; 43.6% of eligible voters participated in the decision.
While the federal government is indeed moving aggressively against climate action, ballot initiatives give power to the grassroots.
The revised bill, in typical German style comprehensively named “Klimaschutzverbesserungsgesetz” (climate protection improvement law) will require that the city administration must present an emissions estimate no later than six months after the end of every calendar year.
There is a lot in this new climate law that the wonky types among climate activists will love. On their website, proponents list the exact amount of tons of carbon (in thousands) the city will be permitted to emit each year until 2040. If the permissible total annual emissions for the previous calendar year have been exceeded, the government must take measures to offset the excess total annual emissions within five months. If the total emissions exceed or fall short of the permissible total annual emissions from the year in which the act comes into force, the difference shall be credited evenly to the remaining total annual emissions for the next five years until 2040 at the latest, thus greatly incentivizing ramped-up action and disincentivizing delay.
But the referendum’s emphasis on a just transition is also key: If climate action is to benefit everyone, not only those with large pockets who after all tend to also be the bigger emitters, measures taken to protect the climate must be designed in a socially acceptable way. The changes to the existing climate protection law will make climate protection more fair for all in Hamburg, impacting housing, energy, and transportation. Homeowners, for example, will be incentivized to retrofit their homes, but won’t be able to push the costs entirely onto their tenants. Public transit will be prioritized without penalizing those who commute by car.
By emphasizing transparency and predictability (“Planbarkeit”), the proponents also took the needs of companies into account that invest in climate protection initiatives. And because the referendum included legislation, the newly revised law will automatically go into effect within a month from this vote, i.e. on November 12, 2025.
Opponents were quick to complain that the new law would endanger jobs in the city. But over 100 businesses had written an open letter in support of the referendum, and the proponents include positive impacts on economic growth and job prospects for the city in their FAQ.
While the federal government is indeed moving aggressively against climate action, ballot initiatives give power to the grassroots. The climate movement in Hamburg had fought for two years to make this referendum happen. A group of volunteers from various backgrounds contributed to drafting and refining the text. Over 80 different organizations joined a broad alliance of supporters, including cultural and religious institutions, companies, and NGOs. Even the soccer club FC St. Pauli cosponsored the referendum. The chances were not high for it to win—typically, a referendum only wins once every 10 years.
Americans have lots of experience with the process of running ballot initiatives. Portland, Oregon, for example, ran a successful initiative that resulted in the establishment of the PCEF (Portland Clean Energy Fund), a smart move that has since brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the city’s coffers. Over 5,000 miles apart, Hamburg and Portland nevertheless have something in common: Hope-filled people power—sometimes a few frogs mix in…Keep ReadingShow Less
Care About the Climate Crisis? The World Is With You
People who support climate action are implicitly told—by their elected officials, by the fossil fuel industry, by news coverage and social media discourse—that theirs is a minority, even a fringe, view. That is not what the new research finds.
Apr 25, 2025
A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world—between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies—want their governments to take stronger climate action.
As co-founders of a nonprofit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us. And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about the climate crisis.
For years—and especially at this fraught political moment—most coverage of the climate crisis has been defensive. People who support climate action are implicitly told—by their elected officials, by the fossil fuel industry, by news coverage and social media discourse—that theirs is a minority, even a fringe, view.
That is not what the new research finds.
What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do?
The most recent study, People’s Climate Vote 2024, was conducted by Oxford University as part of a program the United Nations launched after the 2015 Paris agreement. Among poorer countries, where roughly 4 out of 5 of the world’s inhabitants live, 89% of the public wanted stronger climate action. In richer, industrialized countries, roughly 2 out of 3 people wanted stronger action. Combining rich and poor populations, “80% [of people globally] want more climate action from their governments.”
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication—which, along with its partner, the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, is arguably the global gold standard in climate opinion research—has published numerous studies documenting the same point: Most people, in most countries, want stronger action on the climate crisis.
A fascinating additional 89% angle was documented in a study published by Nature Climate Change, which noted that the overwhelming global majority does not know it is the majority: “[I]ndividuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act,” the report states.
In other words, an overwhelming majority of people want stronger action against climate change. But at least for now, this global climate majority is a silent majority.
Taken together, the new research turns the conventional wisdom about climate opinion on its ear. At a time when many governments and companies are stalling or retreating from rapidly phasing out the fossil fuels that are driving deadly heat, fires, and floods, the fact that more than 8 out of 10 human beings on the planet want their political representatives to preserve a livable future offers a much-needed ray of hope. The question is whether and how that mass sentiment might be translated into effective action.
What would it mean if this silent climate majority woke up—if its members came to understand just how many people, both in distant lands and in their own communities, think and feel like they do? How might this majority’s actions—as citizens, as consumers, as voters—change? If the current narrative in news and social media shifted from one of retreat and despair to one of self-confidence and common purpose, would people shift from being passive observers to active shapers of their shared future? If so, what kinds of climate action would they demand from their leaders?
These are the animating questions behind the 89% Project, a yearlong media initiative that launched this week. The journalistic nonprofit we run, Covering Climate Now, has invited newsrooms from around the world to report, independently or together, on the climate majorities found in their communities.
Who are the people who comprise the 89%? Given that support for climate action varies by country—the figure is 74% in the U.S., 80% in India, 90% in Burkina Faso—does support also vary by age, gender, political affiliation, and economic status? What do members of the climate majority want from their political and community leaders? What obstacles are standing in the way?
The week of coverage that started on Tuesday will be followed by months of further reporting that explores additional aspects of public opinion about climate change. If most of the climate majority have no idea they are the majority, do they also not realize that defusing the climate crisis is by no means impossible? Scientists have long said that humanity possesses the tools and knowhow necessary to limit temperature rise to the Paris agreement’s aspirational target of the 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. What has been lacking is the political will to implement those tools and leave fossil fuels behind. The 89% Project will culminate in a second joint week of coverage before the COP30 United Nations climate meeting in Brazil in November.
While it’s impossible to know how many newsrooms will participate in this week’s 89% coverage, early signs are heartening. The Guardian newspaper and the Agence France-Presse news agency have joined as lead partners of the project. Other newsrooms offering coverage include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, and Time magazines in the U.S.; the National Observer newspaper in Canada; the Deutsche Welle global broadcaster in Germany; the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy; the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Japan; and the multinational collaborative Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism based in Jordan.
We believe the current mismatch between public will and government action amounts to a deficit in democracy. Can that deficit be addressed if the climate majority awakens to its existence? Would people elect different leaders? Buy (or not buy) different products? Would they talk differently to family, friends, and co-workers about what can be done to build a cleaner, safer future?
The first step to answering such questions is to give the silent climate majority a voice. That will happen, finally, this week in news coverage around the world.
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
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Even as LA Burns, Most of Us Are Not 'There' Yet on Climate
Millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change.
Jan 15, 2025
Can I admit something to you? Gotta say... I feel embarrassed about this. Perhaps even ashamed.
Okay, here goes: Yes, when I read, see, or hear accounts of what is happening in Los Angeles right now, I do experience empathy and sadness and compassion. And—oh yeah—also a healthy dose of heartbreak and rage about the torrents of disinformation that, these days, automatically mushroom around any event of any significance, especially if climate change is involved.
But—and here's the confession part—I am guessing that my primary reaction, the one about which I feel shame, is based upon this: I'm not there.
In other words, since it's not myself (or any of my loved ones) who is being directly and viscerally and financially impacted, my reactions of empathy occur (literally and figuratively) at a distance. Sure, I'll experience these feelings for a while, especially as I am taking in information or pictures about the situation, but then most of that will quickly evaporate as I go about my day. My at-a-distance reactions almost never move me to take direct and impactful and lasting action, because... I'm not there.
And so my primary reaction is a mixture of relief and (here comes the shame part) some level of indifference.
I'm not proud of this. But there it is.
Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet.
It's an April day in 2001 and I sit across from the chief of hepatology of Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia as he shares the conclusions of various diagnostic procedures brought on by some recent health difficulties.
"David, you have a disease called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), which is a progressive narrowing of the bile ducts."
Hmm. Okay. That doesn't sound all that bad, right? Okay, I'm not even sure what bile ducts do or where they are located, but...
"So," the doc continues, "What it comes down to is that you will eventually need a liver transplant, and there's nothing we can do to prevent that."
Shock. Utter shock. You see, I wasn't feeling any symptoms of this disease, this PSC. None at all. I'd been dealing with an unrelated medical matter and labs revealed that something was off with my liver numbers and further investigation revealed the PSC.
It took me about a month to get over the shock of my diagnosis. And then... well... I just got on with living my life mostly as if nothing had changed. Since I had no symptoms (they would begin to kick in about three years down the road—fatigue, itching, jaundice) and could do nothing to prevent the disease progression, it was as if I didn't have a disease at all.
I wasn't "there" yet.
Back to Los Angeles. Full Disclosure: I know much more about climate change than the average person. I researched it intensively and wrote 15 published articles back in 2012-2015. Then... I mostly gave up writing about it. Why? Because it gradually became apparent that mere information—no matter how compellingly or creatively expressed—was NOT going to move most people to take significant action.
Why? Because most people would not be "there" for years and decades to come? Sure, climate change would become more and more symptomatic, but the Earth is a big place. An increasingly occurring wildfire here or there, a superstorm here or there, a superdrought here or there, still ends up leaving the vast majority of folks not being obviously and viscerally impacted.
I mean... at least at first.
January, 2006. Dr. Susan Althoff—one of three surgeons who performed the liver transplant—shoots me a steely look: "David, we WILL get you through this."
I am laying on my bed in the liver-transplant wing of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. My youngest brother is also in this wing since, about a week before, he donated half of his liver to me (It's called a Live Donor Transplant).
So now I've got a new half-a-liver (which, incredibly, will grow to a 100% liver in about a month's time, as will my brother's remaining half-a-liver). The problem is that my body has so far rejected my new liver. This is not particularly uncommon. Suddenly, there is a huge hunk of "foreign" tissue inside of me, and my body's immune system is trying to eject it. There are drugs for this, which I am now taking and will be taking for the rest of my life.
But these drugs are being overwhelmed, and so they put me on the next protocol—high dose steroids. And—wheeeeee!—the steroids DO give me drug-induced diabetes but are not enough to turn the tide. Dr. Althoff has just entered to give me that piece of bad news. I am beyond exhausted and respond with some expression of despair and hopelessness.
Dr. Althoff responds with that steely look (see above) and explains: "We have one more protocol called OKT-3 (when they bring out the letters-and-numbers meds, you know it's serious). We've only used it three times in the last year. You'll know it's working if you get a high fever and start to feel really, really sick."
Twelve hours later, I am shivering under a special, ice-filled blanket. I have a high fever and feel quite sick, wrecked even. The OKT-3 is apparently working.
Finally, I am "there." Boy-oh-boy, am I there. Right there. Exactly there. Everything else in the world disappears. Every single thing other than wanting this to stop and wanting to get better and feel better. I would do anything.
Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet. Most of them, I am sure, would do anything to make it stop and to make things better.
Even the ones who—subject to the unceasing and enormously financed propaganda of fossil fuel corporations and the governments and political parties that they have purchased—have denied the reality of human-caused climate change (as well as the ones—let us not forget—who blandly "believe" it, but have placed it way down on the list of concerns) will be less likely to dismiss the scientific reports that will be published finding that the intensity of these fires was 20% or 40% or 75% more likely to have happened due to the inexorably heating planet. These reports will be coming. This is certain.
Because—just like me under that ice blanket—they are finally "there," their nervous systems violated and assaulted. Their world turned upside down.
I am forever grateful to my brother. Yes, my situation was serious. But I was only one person. And I was willing to go along with the science. And I only needed one other person (with a compatible blood-type!!) to step up. And, lastly, as my fatigue increased and my weight melted away and my eyes and skin turned yellow, I was brought at least partially "there" and became willing to undergo fairly extreme and grueling duress to set things right.
But when it comes to setting things right climate-wise, there are 8.2 billion of us. Most are ceaselessly occupied trying to make ends meet. Many are swayed by the flat-out disinformation campaigns of those wishing to keep things as they are. Most—though this ratio will gradually swing the other way—are not yet nearly "there" in terms of direct-and-undeniable climate impacts.
This is a stark brew.
Things can get stark under the ice blanket or the thousand-and-one other grueling demands of major surgery and recovery (I needed a follow-up surgery in 2010 which was—I kid you not—at least 200% more difficult than the transplant. Once things are allowed to go a great degree out-of-balance, it becomes much more likely that unforeseen complications and collapses will ensue.)
I could have died during my transplant in 2006. I very nearly did die in the 2010 surgery.
Some people have died in the LA fires. The body count continues to grow. Many, many more have lost now-uninsurable homes, cars, pets, etc. The "stark brew" cited above all but assures that millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change—even the grueling and deeply inconvenient change that is demanded by the physics of Earth.
I wish it were different. So do many people whom I know.
But it isn't different.
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A Trio of Small Christmas Gifts to Stave Off Climate Despair
From solar-powered data centers and balconies to a landmark legal victory, I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little.
Dec 24, 2024
One of my jobs in the tiny Vermont town where I live is to lead the Christmas Eve service at the little white church alongside the river. I’m not actually a preacher, and it’s not particularly denominational—my wife and my daughter, who are Jewish, are usually on hand to belt out carols and there’s occasionally a reading from Dr. Seuss. But the neighbors stand at the pulpit one by one to recite the Scriptures that tell the story of this remarkable baby, and then I do my best in a short homily to pick out some points of light. A little harder this year than most, but perhaps more important because of that. The goal is to make sure the community holds, now more than ever.
And I suppose that in some way the community we’ve built around this newsletter is a congregation of sorts, with me again in the role of shambling, ill-trained preacher. So I’ve poked around in the news to bring you a trio of small gifts—ambiguous, by no means definitive, but nonetheless things to build on.
The first comes, somewhat remarkably, from Silicon Valley.
As you almost certainly know, the rapid growth of AI is causing despair among some energy experts. The giant data centers that “train” these various models to do what they do (help lazy students write banal termpapers, say) soak up huge amounts of electricity, and in the last year or two the fossil fuel industry has seized on that as avidly as they seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—anything to make the case for extending their business model a little longer. Arielle Samuelson, writing at Emily Atkin’s pathbreaking newsletter Heated, offers a really powerful account of what’s gone on:
The growth of AI has been called the “savior” of the gas industry. In Virginia alone, the data center capital of the world, a new state report found that AI demand could add a new 1.5 gigawatt gas plant every two years for 15 consecutive years.
And now, as energy demand for AI rises, oil corporations are planning to build gas plants that specifically serve data centers. Last week, Exxon announced that it is building a large gas plant that will directly supply power to data centers within the next five years. The company claims the gas plant will use technology that captures polluting emissions—despite the fact that the technology has never been used at a commercial scale before.
Chevron also announced that the company is preparing to sell gas to an undisclosed number of data centers. “We're doing some work right now with a number of different people that's not quite ready for prime time, looking at possible solutions to build large-scale power generation,” said CEO Mike Wirth at an Atlantic Council event. The opportunity to sell power to data centers is so promising that even private equity firms are investing billions in building energy infrastructure.
So, ugh. Except that it’s important to remember that Big Oil is an industry that lies a lot, and some of those commitments may not be quite as firm as they’re saying. In fact, a new report—this is the first Christmas present—from a team of Silicon Valley types came out last week, making the case that if these data centers are actually going to get built anytime soon, the best bet by far is for Google et al to put up solar farms next door. Building new gas plants, as they point out, takes a number of years—really, anything that requires a new connection to the grid goes slowly. But if you have a “co-located microgrid”—i.e., a dedicated solar farm right next to your mysterious warehouse of servers—that can be put up in a relative trice.
Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around two years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders.
The only one of the authors I knew before this was Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist employed by the payment company Stripe, but the others come from reputable places (Paces, which expedites renewable development, and Scale Microgrids) and they thank a passel of collaborators at places like Tesla and Anthropic. And their research seems impeccable—they work through the costs and the reliability of renewables paired with batteries, and they return again and again to the speed with which these new facilities could be built.
One thing they don’t stress, but which I think could be politically important, is that all of these big AI players have promised in recent years that they would zero out their emissions. And though no one in the White House will hold them to that, most of these companies are in places like Washington and California filled with environmentally committed workers and investors; we should be able to organize some pressure on them to do the right thing. It’s not the perfect thing. In a rational world we’d postpone the glories of AI long enough to power up all the heat pumps and cars from renewable electricity first. But if they get expertise building solar farms for their data centers, the experience may turn these behemoths into better crusaders for clean energy. One can hope, anyway. Here’s the final bottom line from the report:
Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the U.S. Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives… The advantages to whoever moves on this quickly could be substantial.
And then there’s the second present I promised, which was delivered Wednesday afternoon by the Montana Supreme Court. It upheld, on a 6-1 vote, a lower court ruling that the state’s children have a “fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment,” and that that includes carefully analyzing state energy policies to keep them from damaging the climate.
This ruling is under the state constitution, which was amended shortly after Earth Day in 1970 to include environmental protections. (America’s Western states have not always been bright red). The landmark ruling comes almost a year and a half after a remarkable trial, which featured a mix of young Montanans explaining how climate change was damaging their lives (breathing wildfire smoke, for one) and nationally renowned climate experts who volunteered their time to make a compelling case. The state all but punted its response, not even putting its lead climate-denier on the stand after paying her large sums of money to prepare testimony, and the district court issued a powerful finding that’s now been upheld.
This doesn’t necessarily have national implications—shamefully, the Biden DOJ has buried the federal equivalent, Juliana v. U.S., under a blizzard of writs, picking up where the Trump administration left off. And it probably won’t immediately change Montana’s current commitment to using more gas. But it is a clear moral victory that will cast a long shadow. As Cornell legal scholar Leehi Yona said this morning, “This is a historic case and one that could serve as a model for state-level lawsuits, particularly as an alternative to federal courts (such as the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently seems unreceptive to climate cases).”
Mostly, I’m happy for the kids involved. I got to interview a couple of them on stage this fall at a gathering sponsored by Protect Our Winters. They were eloquent and moving, and I hope very much that this ruling strengthens their commitment to fight. The Trump era will end someday, and we’ll need a new wave of smart and moral people to carry on the crucial fights—these are them!
And the third? Attentive readers will remember how happy I was earlier this year at news that half a million Germans had taken advantage of a new law to hang solar panels from the balconies of their apartments. Well, according to a new report in The Guardian, by year’s end that number has swelled to a million and a half Germans, and now it’s taking off in Spain and elsewhere.
Manufacturers say that installing a couple of 300-watt panels will give a saving of up to 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill. With an outlay of €400-800 and with no installation cost, the panels could pay for themselves within six years.
In Spain, where two thirds of the population live in apartments and installing panels on the roof requires the consent of a majority of the building’s residents, this DIY technology has obvious advantages.
With solar balconies, no such consent is required unless the facade is listed as of historic interest or there is a specific prohibition from the residents’ association or the local authority. Furthermore, as long as the installation does not exceed 800 watts it doesn’t require certification, which can cost from €100 to €400, depending on the area.
“The beauty of the solar balconies is they are flexible, cheap, and plug straight into the domestic network via a converter, so you don’t have to pay for the installation,” says Santiago Vernetta, CEO of Tornasol Energy, one of Spain’s main suppliers.
Putting up one of these would be illegal almost everywhere in America—but that’s something to work on next year. Why should Europeans have all the fun? Belgium has just ended its ban. As one official explained: “If 1.5 million Germans have bought solar balcony kits there must be something in it,” he says.
I wish I had yet more such gifts to offer (I’m keeping a close eye on Albany, where Gov. Kathy Hochul may still sign the crucial Climate Superfund bill before year’s end, and if that happens I’ll let you know). But I hope these help set the holiday mood just a little. I can tell you that it’s snowing this afternoon up here on the spine of the Greens. And since I’m typing up the program for the Christmas Eve service this afternoon, I can tell you how it ends: with everyone in town walking through the church doors and into the (hopefully crisp) night air singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
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Look Up: The Scariest Part When We See the Big, Big, Big Picture
As a new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
Oct 23, 2024
This is “Climate week” in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment.
This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years. That’s the period scientists call the Phanerozoic—the latest of the earth’s four geological eons (we’re still in it), and the one marked by the true profusion of plant and animal life. It’s a lovely piece of science, and it’s lovely too because it reminds us of all we’re heir to in this tiny brief moment that marks the human time on earth. So staggeringly much—strange and extreme and fecund—has come before us.
But it’s also scary as can be, for two big reasons.
The first is that it shows the earth has gotten very very warm in the past. As the Washington Post explained in an excellent analysis yesterday, “the study suggests that at its hottest the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius).” Our current average temperature—already elevated by global warming to the highest value ever recorded—is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius. For most of the 500 million years the study covers, the earth has been in a hothouse state, with an average temperature of 71.6 Fahrenheit, or 22 Celsius, much higher than now. Only about an eighth of the time has the earth been in its current “coldhouse” state—but of course that includes all the time that humans have been around. It is the world we know and we’re adapted to.
In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as eight degrees Celsius higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic
Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out. And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life, though on a planet with huge numbers of nuclear weapons who knows. But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.
But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.
In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.
Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.
Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.
Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.
That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over this week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.
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Young Climate Activists Are Fueling Hope and Winning Change
While we can’t count on certain stubborn politicians to save our only planet, we can count on the young people at the heart of the climate movement.
Sep 14, 2024
The past 20 years have been critical in the fight for bold and sustainable climate solutions. The next five years will be even more vital—and young people like me are fighting hard to make sure our leaders get it right.
Research shows we have about five years left to avert global warming beyond 1.5°C, the tipping point when even more severe climate disruptions could exacerbate hunger, conflict, and drought worldwide.
Climate change—long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil—impacts our livelihoods and our lives. It harms our health and well-being and threatens our access to vital resources, from water to food to housing.
We’re the last generation that can save the world from climate disaster—and we’re giving the fight for our lives and for a better future everything we’ve got.
Communities on the front lines of the climate crisis are already paying the price for inadequate climate action. Pacific islands like Tuvalu are already sinking and expected to be completely submerged in coming years. Meanwhile, scientists predict that rising sea levels will leave 60% of Miami-Dade County under water by 2060.
While we can’t count on certain stubborn politicians to save our only planet, we can count on the young people at the heart of the climate movement.
The global youth-led climate movement has a long history of standing up to corporate giants and their political allies who exacerbate climate change. Despite failed attempts by some politicians to patronize, belittle, or discredit the teenagers and 20-somethings leading protests and driving policy demands, young climate activists are fueling hope—and winning change.
In June 2023, youth climate activists won a landmark lawsuit, Held v. Montana, when a judge ruled that the state’s failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects was unconstitutional. Similar suits are underway in many other states.
Universities also have a prime role to play in encouraging students to practice sustainability and foster social change. At my university, Virginia Tech, students can participate in a Climate Action Living Laboratory (CALL), where they work with faculty and staff on sustainability projects and research, using our campus and surrounding community networks to work towards the university’s climate action goals.
In my Virginia Tech coursework, I got to harvest food for our dining facilities at our campus farm, compost on an Indigenous farm, visit a local community garden, and tour a food sorting facility—all while working closely with campus partners I wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Across the country, institutions like Colorado State, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, Dickinson College, Furman, and the University of Vermont have implemented living learning labs of their own. In addition to advancing sustainability initiatives, these labs combine disciplines and skills—and unite diverse groups of people—to incubate innovative climate solutions.
You can help us grow the movement, too. Consider supporting domestic climate activist youth movements in your local community and organizations like Sunrise D.C., a local branch of the youth climate organization where activists in the nation’s capital get involved at both the local and national level.
We’re the last generation that can save the world from climate disaster—and we’re giving the fight for our lives and for a better future everything we’ve got. Join us.
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4 Signs of Hope in a Burning World
Rapid and radical decarbonization is possible and is starting to happen on a near-global scale, but it must proceed very much faster.
Aug 21, 2024
The recent wildfires in Greece started on Sunday 11 August in Varnavas, 35 kilometres (22 miles) north of Athens. By the time they were brought under control three days later, they had reached the capital’s suburbs, having burnt through 25,000 acres of forest.
Though the fires fortunately did not get fully into Athens, it was a close call. Similar extreme weather events—whether wildfire, drought, storm, flood, or heat dome—are now seen on a near-daily basis somewhere around the world, and are often more intense than even a couple of decades ago. They are the most visible elements of climate change’s shift into climate breakdown.
We are also seeing clear worldwide changes. Last year was exceptionally hot—the hottest year since accurate weather records were first kept in the 1880s—but this year is perhaps more worrying. 2023 was an El Niňo year; one in which the sea surface temperature warms by 0.5°C above the long-term average. It’s a climate phenomenon that occurs every two to seven years and leads to temporary air temperature increases across much of the world in those years.
The future really does look grim. A world of devastating weather events, unliveable cities, gross food shortages, mass migration, and global marginalization beckons.
The problem is that El Niňo has been fading since February, yet the global pattern does not show the anticipated easing of temperatures. Instead, we are seeing the opposite; 15 national heat records have been broken so far this year, as have 130 monthly national temperature records. As Costa Rican climate historian Maximiliano Herrera told The Guardian: “Far from dwindling with the end of El Niňo, records are falling at even much faster pace compared to late 2023.”
In fact, June this year was the 13th month in a row to set a monthly global temperature record, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, whose ERA5 satellite suggested that 22 July was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. The World Meteorological Organisation, meanwhile, has reported that at least 10 countries have already recorded temperatures above 50°C this year.
The implications are clear enough. We are heading for a global disaster at a level frequently warned of but even more frequently ignored—whether by politicians, business leaders, or others—while the fossil fuel industries and countries that exploit oil, gas, and coal continue to argue that the problem is grossly exaggerated.
More than 50 years ago, economic geographer Edwin Brooks, in a much-quoted remark, warned of “a crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes.” His warning focused on economic inequalities and was made before the full impact of climate change was apparent, yet it is more timely than ever.
The future really does look grim. A world of devastating weather events, unliveable cities, gross food shortages, mass migration, and global marginalization beckons.
The task of avoiding this dystopic future is huge. Four years ago, a U.N. report identified the need to decrease carbon emissions by 7% a year until 2030 to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. They are still rising, and the need now is for an annual reduction of at least 10%.
It is a predicament that will require a third societal transition. The first was the farming revolution over several thousand years and the second was the industrial revolution, which started close to four centuries ago and is still under way. The third will be learning to live within the limits set by the capacity of the world’s ecosystem to handle human activity, initially by preventing climate breakdown, which must be achieved in mere decades.
But there are some signs of hope.
The first is that climate science has come on by leaps and bounds in the past 40 years and there is much greater confidence in its predictions. This means intergovernmental panels—which have tended to be overly cautious about not exaggerating the impact of the climate crisis, due to a need to work in consensus—will able to be far blunter in their statements.
Then there is the evidence just about everywhere that climate breakdown is happening. The third reason is that the first two will combine to inspire more activists, both young and old, to act. Many are willing to engage in nonviolent direct action despite elite determination to maintain the status quo through harsh legal measures.
There is a fourth reason for hope: the extraordinary way that rapidly improving technologies mean it is so often (and increasingly) much cheaper to use renewable energy than relying on fossil carbon energy sources.
Rapid and radical decarbonization is possible and is starting to happen on a near-global scale. But it must proceed very much faster. Global net zero needs to be achieved by 2040, not 2050, and that means that richer states must aim for net zero by 2035 while providing funding to speed up the process right across the Global South. It is a huge task, but that is the way to prevent climate breakdown.
To put it in a wider context, three tasks face us all. The first is the most urgent: coming to terms with environmental limitations. The second is an evolution of the world economy to ensure a far more equal sharing of what we have, and the third is responding to security challenges without depending on the early use of military force.
It is a transformational task but thanks to the immediacy of climate breakdown there isn’t really any alternative. Luckily, for now, there is time to do it, just.
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Most People on Earth, Even in Petrostates, Want Quick Fossil Fuel Phaseout: Poll
"There can be no doubt that citizens across the world are saying to their leaders, you have to act and, above all, have to act faster," a U.N. official said. "This is an issue that almost everyone, everywhere, can agree on."
Jun 20, 2024
A large majority of the global population, including people who live in oil, gas, and coal producing countries, supports a fast transition to clean energy and a phaseout of fossil fuels, a poll released Thursday showed.
Across 77 countries, 72% of those surveyed supported a quick fossil fuel phaseout, while an even higher percentage, 80%, supported stronger climate action in general, according to the poll, called Peoples' Climate Vote and conducted for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) with the University of Oxford and GeoPoll.
"There can be no doubt that citizens across the world are saying to their leaders, you have to act and, above all, have to act faster," UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner told The Guardian. "This is an issue that almost everyone, everywhere, can agree on."
📣 Our #PeoplesClimateVote 2024 results are live! The world’s largest standalone public opinion survey on #ClimateChange.
The results are clear. People want more #ClimateAction, and they want it now.
Explore a world of views on the climate crisis: https://t.co/mJsEzN3NGy pic.twitter.com/2kwA4KcPnn
— UN Development (@UNDP) June 20, 2024
People in most major fossil fuel producing nations support a quick energy transition in their own countries, the poll showed. In the United States, the world's largest oil and gas producer, 53% supported either a "very" or "somewhat" quick phaseout; in Saudi Arabia, the second largest, 75% did so; and in China and India, the leading coal producers, the figures were 80% and 76%, respectively.
The poll also showed overwhelming support for transnational cooperation, even if it requires setting aside other differences: 86% of those surveyed said want countries to tackle climate change together. Steiner called this a "stunning" level of consensus.
Steiner noted that fossil fuel subsidies distort the market and subvert the public will for change.
"There are very narrow, self-interested agendas that maintain artificially inflated [profits] for fossil fuel-based industries that ultimately are coming at the cost of everyone," he said.
The poll—the largest standalone public opinion survey on climate change to date, building on a first edition that was run in 2021—clarifies the will of the global public and strengthens the moral case for climate action, commentators said.
"Brilliant to see clear, credible evidence that the overwhelming majority of people across the world—oil rentier economy or not—want to see transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy 'quickly,'" X user Dave Drabble wrote. "Let's not let oil and gas interests determine our fate."
Similarly rejecting the influence of fossil fuel interests, Steiner said, "It is so important we let the people speak for themselves."
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Green Groups Protest 'Nuclear Fairy Tale' in Brussels
"All the evidence shows that nuclear power is too slow to build, too expensive, and it remains highly polluting and dangerous," one activist said.
Mar 21, 2024
An international coalition of environmental groups dropped banners and blockaded roads to protest the International Nuclear Energy Summit in Brussels on Thursday.
While the summit, hosted by the Belgian government and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), pushes nuclear energy as a replacement for fossil fuels, more than 600 climate action groups launched a declaration calling nuclear power plants a "distraction which slows down the energy transition."
"We are in a climate emergency, so time is precious, and the governments here today are wasting it with nuclear energy fairy tales," Greenpeace E.U. senior campaigner Lorelei Limousin said in a statement. "All the evidence shows that nuclear power is too slow to build, too expensive, and it remains highly polluting and dangerous."
"The nuclear lobby camouflages itself beneath a climate-friendly facade, hoping to divert massive sums of money away from real climate solutions, at the expense of people and the planet."
At the United Nations COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates last year, more than 20 countries pledged to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. However, Greenpeace France calculated that achieving this would mean finishing 70 reactors each year between 2040 and 2050. This would be an unprecedented buildout in defiance of current trends: Between 2020 and 2023, 21 reactors were completed while 24 were shut down worldwide.
In the European Union specifically, many countries turned away from nuclear after 2011 in response to the Fukushima accident in Japan, according to Reuters. Germany shuttered its last three reactors for good in April 2023 following a successful anti-nuclear campaign there. In general, the nuclear share of the E.U. power mix dropped from 32.8% in 2000 to 22.8% in 2023, Greenpeace said.
Activists argue that nuclear still poses all the dangers the anti-nuclear movement has been warning about for decades and also cannot be ramped up quickly enough to prevent escalating climate extremes.
To reinforce this message, members of Greenpeace France blockaded the main roads to the Brussels summit using cars and bicycles. They also lit pink flares and threw pink powder as a motorcade of officials en route to the summit approached. The action succeeded in delaying the arrival of several delegations, Greenpeace E.U. said.
Other demonstrators dropped banners from the summit site at Brussels Expo reading, "Nuclear Fairy Tale," while a group representing the 600 declaration signatories protested in front of an inflatable bouncy castle holding up a sign reading, "Nuclear fairy tales = climate crisis."
The declaration was drafted by Climate Action Network Europe and signed by groups from at least 56 different countries and territories including Climate Action Network Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Sierra Club, Food and Water Watch, CodePink, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and several 350.org, Fridays for Future, and Friends of the Earth affiliates.
"The nuclear lobby camouflages itself beneath a climate-friendly facade, hoping to divert massive sums of money away from real climate solutions, at the expense of people and the planet," the declaration reads.
The signatories pointed out that, while the world must dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in order to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, it would take longer than this for any new nuclear plant to come online.
At the same time, it costs significantly more money to increase nuclear capacity than renewable options like wind and solar, they stressed. A new reactor requires almost four times the funds of a new wind power installation.
"Governments need to invest in proven climate solutions, such as home insulation, public transport, and renewable energy, rather than expensive experiments, like small modular reactors, which have no guarantees of actually delivering," the declaration says.
It also points to safety risks across the nuclear lifecycle, from uranium mining to waste storage. And it adds that those dangers would only increase as temperatures rise.
"The climate crisis also increases the risks involved in nuclear power, as increased heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding all pose significant threats to the plants themselves and to the systems that aim to prevent nuclear accidents," the signatories argued.
Instead, the declaration proposes that governments focus on achieving 100% renewable energy while also improving efficiency.
"What we demand is a just transition toward a safe, renewable, and affordable energy system that secures jobs and protects life on our planet," the declaration concludes.
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Clergy to Vanguard: Stop Funding Fossil Fuels!
Vanguard must decarbonize, massively scale up sustainable investments, adopt a human rights policy, and use its power to hold the worst climate actors accountable.
Oct 27, 2023
“When the fires burn and the seas rise, not in our name, we say, not in our name, we say, not in our name.”
Earlier this week, we found ourselves singing those words as we were led out by security at an investment industry conference attended by over 500 investors and industry leaders. A few minutes earlier, we had stood up to interrupt a speaker on the panel.
“I’m a mother, a minister, and a client,” Amy called out. “I’m desperately worried about my child’s future. Aren’t you worried about yours?”
Then Chelsea spoke. “Vanguard has $300 billion invested in oil, gas, and coal,” she said as security guards approached to force us to leave. “This is reckless and immoral.”
76% of all investors would rather make a dentist visit than invest in an environmentally destructive company.
Vanguard, of course, is the world’s second largest asset manager, after only BlackRock. The company was sponsoring the Pensions & Investments “Defined Contributions West” conference in Southern California, and one of its executives was speaking on the panel.
Vanguard manages over $7 trillion in assets, and its bread and butter is managing retirement accounts. That means that the millions of customers who rely on Vanguard to manage their investments may have no idea that the company is using their money to worsen the climate crisis.
Here’s the thing: 80% of people want to invest responsibly. One study showed that 76% of all investors would rather make a dentist visit than invest in an environmentally destructive company.
Investors don’t want their retirement funds to destroy their children’s or grandchildren’s future. But Vanguard, BlackRock, and other major asset managers have a minuscule amount of their trillions of investments in sustainable funds. Vanguard is ranked worst among all major asset managers for climate commitments. This is not okay.
The science is clear: There can be no further fossil fuel development if we are to keep the global temperature from rising beyond the 1.5°C threshold that scientists agree is the most warming our planet can bear before utter catastrophe.
And beyond the risks to humanity itself, Vanguard is well aware that climate risk is also financial risk. Vanguard’s investments in the fossil fuel industry could ultimately cost its investors in the long run—putting up to $3 trillion in assets at risk if Vanguard does not act to mitigate climate risk.
Disrupting a professional conference in front of hundreds of attendees was not easy. But we have come to believe that the climate crisis is too urgent to wait.
We are people of faith and spirit. Amy’s Unitarian Universalist faith affirms the interdependent web of all creation. Chelsea’s interspiritual background inspires public action that expresses the deepest moral values. Both of our religious backgrounds call us to work for a more just future for all beings.
So, we stood up.
Our spirituality helped us through the process. To prepare, we grounded ourselves in prayer. We remembered all those suffering from climate disasters, both human and non-human. We held close our visions for a world in which all beings and our common home were revered rather than desecrated for profit. We felt clear in heart and spirit that this was the right thing to do. We were together, supported by other colleagues. Without these spiritual practices and community, we couldn’t have done it.
It would be great if we could simply ask Vanguard to do the right thing, and they’d do it. But for years, countless people have called, written letters, asked for meetings, and held protests. Our colleagues at the Earth Quaker Action Team and Vanguard S.O.S. have led campaigns to push Vanguard to improve its practices, to no avail. In fact, Vanguard has moved in the opposite direction, by withdrawing from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative.
It is irresponsibly naive to think that polite and rational approaches to this threat are sufficient. As people of faith, we need to summon deeper courage and act. For decades, we’ve pointed to Dr. King and Gandhi as our spiritual heroes. The time has come when we need to draw on the same well of inner strength that made them into giants.
The solutions are clear: Vanguard must decarbonize, massively scale up sustainable investments, adopt a human rights policy, and use its power to hold the worst climate actors accountable.
Vanguard can use its power to give us a chance at a liveable future AND investment returns. But it’s not going to happen until Vanguard experiences a wave of grassroots pressure that forces it to change.
We invite you to act in faith and courage with us by sending a fax to Vanguard. To win, it will take all of us doing all we can, and so we also hope you feel called to do more. Please visit www.GreenFaith.org if you’d like to learn more about how you can take faith-filled action to stop the funding of fossil fuels.
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