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climate movement
The Council on Foreign Relations’ ‘Climate Realism’ Is Anything But
In light of the first and second, the hypocrisy of CFR’s third pillar is particularly absurd.
CFR’s agenda is as tone-deaf as it is without bearing in history, science, or morality.
On the first pillar, Sivaram argues we should simply accept and prepare for a world with 3°C of warming—his so-called “realism”—but doesn’t stop to share what such a “real” world would look like.
At 3°C, 3.25 billion people will be exposed to lethal heat and humidity every year. The number of people globally who lack sufficient access to water will double. The majority of coral reefs will die. Sea levels will rise, threatening low-lying islands like the Marshall Islands in the Pacific and coastal cities like Bangkok, Shanghai, Amsterdam, and New Orleans. Agricultural yields will tumble, with most crops across the world suffering.
Perhaps most terrifying, the risk of hitting irreversible and catastrophic climate tipping points—like the wholesale dying off of the Amazon or melting of the Arctic—significantly increases.
Stepping back for a moment, it’s important to remember that the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target came to be because frontline countries demanded such a target. With the Global North coalescing around 2°C ahead of COP21 in Paris and anything more ambitious thus thought politically infeasible, small island countries stunned many observers in leading more than 100 countries in demanding “1.5°C to stay alive.” Such a target, many, like the Marshall Islands’ Tina Stege, argue is necessary to avoid inundating and erasing island nations and low-lying places across the world.
Yet, rich countries in the Global North—and notably the U.S.—have too often ignored these calls in favor of a target that enables the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, prioritizes profits today over catastrophe tomorrow, and maintains the enormous wealth gap between Global North and South. By arguing that the U.S. should cast off the world’s 1.5°C and even 2°C target, Sivaram simultaneously condemns the Global South to a future with catastrophic and irreversible warming, a world without islands, where the Marshall Islands as we know them simply cease to exist.
It is within this context, then, that Sivaram advances the Initiative’s second pillar by presenting the following chart. With it, he argues that reducing U.S. emissions won’t make a meaningful difference because they’re a small share of projected future total global emissions.
However, in so doing, Sivaram ignores—even obfuscates—historical emissions. Consider a different chart, this one from Climate Watch, which illustrates the U.S.’ and the broader Global North’s role in creating the climate crisis in the first place. Looking back to the late 1800s, the U.S. and the European Union are responsible for over 50% of historical global greenhouse emissions (in CO2e).
In contrast, Small Island Developing States (SIDS)—a group of 39 island nations, including the Marshall Islands, across the Caribbean, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea—have collectively contributed less than 1% of global emissions. Yet, SIDS and their nearly 65 million inhabitants are on the frontlines of the climate crisis, threatened by intensifying hurricanes and cyclones, shrinking biodiversity, and rising seas that threaten to swallow them whole.
Thus, Sivaram’s imperial assertion that U.S. emissions aren’t relevant to a “climate realism” agenda ignores what climate justice advocates have been raising for decades: that those most responsible for climate change should, in turn, be most responsible for addressing it. Instead, Sivaram offers an ahistorical perspective on emissions in service of uncapped emissions and U.S. exemption from climate accountability.
And then, finally, Sivaram offers his astoundingly contradictory final pillar: that the U.S. should lead efforts to avert catastrophic climate change. With the U.S. already a historic laggard and obstructionist in global climate negotiations, it’s hard to imagine a world in which the U.S. could possibly be seen to lead on climate while ignoring its own emissions reductions and sacrificing broad swaths of the Global South to sea-level rise, deadly heatwaves, and cascading crises driven by climate.
CFR’s agenda is as tone-deaf as it is without bearing in history, science, or morality. This dangerous initiative is anything but realistic, instead smuggling in a blatantly imperial and morally bankrupt agenda in a grotesque attempt to curry favor with a nationalist and climate-denying American right.
The climate movement must swiftly denounce this agenda and work toward one that aims to avoid overshoot at all costs, repair historic injustice, and uphold the value and dignity of human life across the globe.
Will Trump Come for the Climate Movement on Earth Day?
“There's lots of rumors about what terrible thing [Trump] wants to do on Earth Day, to just give everybody the middle finger,” Brett Hartl, director of governmental operations at the Center for Biological Diversity, said.
An environmental funder granted anonymity to speak freely speculated Trump might try to do to nonprofits what he’s threatened to do with universities.
“The rumors feel credible because this is playbook they use,” the funder said. “That’s why people are taking it very seriously.”
Another environmentalist expressed concern that the administration could attempt to target green groups by defining efforts to limit fossil fuel development as a threat to national security.
The threat comes amid the ongoing decimation of federally funded climate science. In the last few days, for instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has announced it will no longer be maintaining its remarkable map of sea-surface temperatures, while the National Institutes of Health said it was no longer gathering information on the health impacts of global warming.
The NIH said in an internal document obtained by The New York Times that it was the agency’s new policy “not to prioritize” research related to climate change. The document also described the organization’s intent not to fund research on gender identity, vaccine hesitancy, or diversity, equity, and inclusion. N.I.H. employees were instructed to tell researchers to “remove all” mention of the topics and resubmit their applications, even if the main focus was unrelated.
The policy shift on climate change, first reported by ProPublica, stands to drastically limit U.S.-based research into its health effects, which tries to answer questions like whether events like wildfires and heatwaves can affect cardiovascular health and pregnancy.
But now the administration is targeting those who take that science and try to turn it into change. They are the undergunned and outmanned equivalent of the armies of corporate lobbyists, producing the reports and briefing papers that try to stand up to the tide of right-wing media. I know a great many of these people, and I admire their work endlessly; it’s an honor to be counted among them, even if I’m only a volunteer. It was perhaps inevitable that Trump and his team would target us; together we’ve been making life harder for his clients in the fossil fuel industry. And in the new America, if you don’t knuckle under you get a knuckle sandwich. Figuratively speaking. One hopes.
Anyway, there are two questions worth asking. One is, will Trump pay any price for these attacks on climate science and advocacy? He’s not immune to the laws of politics—he clearly paid a price for his absurd tariff policy, which is why he backed off. In the case of tariffs, Trump’s problem was more or less immediate feedback: The bond market threatened to take down the American economy—”got a little queasy” as the president put it—and so he blinked. Slightly longer term feedback will likely come in the form of a recession. The phrase du jour, repeated endlessly, was that he had “touched a hot stove.”
My guess is, very few people would drill for oil without compensation; a great many people will try to defend the planet even if it costs them a lot.
By that standard, one assumes the administration doesn’t fear blowback from a mere hot planet. And yet even if it doesn’t work as fast the bond market, the world’s climate system is now malfunctioning in more or less real time. March was the hottest March on record, topping 2024 by just a smidge; meanwhile, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grew at a record pace last year, apparently because overheated forests are losing some of their capacity as a carbon sink. We’re headed toward what is already forecast to be a more-active-than-usual hurricane season. Trump now owns all this in a way none of his predecessors did: They (with the exception of former President Joe Biden) may not have done much about climate change, but they didn’t insist it was a hoax. So when Tampa drowns or Tucson bakes or whatever happens next, it may stick to him in a way it hasn’t before. He’s got no credible scientific defenders (although the climate denial crew did enlist Elon Musk’s Grok 3 AI to write a paper last week). Damage to his brand is at least a possibility, especially if Democrats display even the slightest skill in linking, say, rising insurance premiums to the climate crisis.
The other question is, will this stop the climate movement? Of course it will make things harder, diverting time and attention and money from important work to dealing with lawyers and auditors; I get to work with paid staff at places like Third Act, and they are not just deeply good people, they are also crucial to making volunteers much more effective.
But the conceit of the right-wing has always been that climate scientists and activists are in it for the money, right down to insisting that protesters outside Tesla dealerships have been paid by George Soros. (I’ve taken my “Kia EV’s Rule” sign out several times, and no check yet!) This has always been an absurd claim: Climate scientists are not getting rich, and most activists could make more money doing almost anything else. Meanwhile, oil executives do get very rich indeed (Trump’s Energy Secretary, fracking honcho Chris Wright, is reportedly worth $171 million), and the success of their companies is due in no small part to an endless collection of tax loopholes and federal, state, and local subsidies. My guess is, very few people would drill for oil without compensation; a great many people will try to defend the planet even if it costs them a lot.
We’ll find out. We’re gearing up for the public launch of SunDay, the nationwide September mass action in defense of renewable energy. If you’re in the Boston area, come to Old North Church at 6:30 pm on Saturday April 26 for a launch ceremony (green lantern in Paul Revere’s steeple!); if you’re anywhere else, we’re doing a digital nationwide launch on April 28. Draw us a sun today to help! Here’s this week’s inspiration, from Lisa Gundlach.
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