play taya99 slots
zenith slots Climate Change Is Losing Its Grip on Our Politics
When the COP29 climate conference comes to an end next week, it will have concluded without an appearance by President Biden. This is not because Donald Trump just won the election, supplanting the outgoing American head of state on the world stage. The president-elect isn’t attending, either. Neither is Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he defeated on Nov. 5.
It’s not just the Americans who are AWOL. Hardly any of the world’s most powerful leaders will be making an appearance in Baku, Azerbaijan — yet another year that the annual Conference of the Parties, convened to stem the problem of warming, has been hosted by a petrostate. President Xi Jinping of China won’t be there, and neither will Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. President Emmanuel Macron of France, the bedraggled face of Western liberalism, is skipping the conference, too. Also missing will be Lula da Silva, who is the leader not just of Brazil but also of the Group of 20. As recently as the Glasgow summit in 2021, the annual climate confab was a who’s who of global power politics. These days, it’s more about who’s missing.
Trump’s election may look like a black dawn to climate activists. And indeed it is: When the timelines of climate action are so short, and the paths to climate stability so narrow and difficult, any setback is a disaster. In 2018, considering a world 1.5 degrees warmer than in preindustrial times, the world’s scientists issued an unignorable warning about the consequences; in 2024, according to a Carbon Brief analysis, we have already surpassed 1.5. And now we know, almost surely, that the United States will be leading the world more quickly and belligerently into that danger zone, not helping to chart a way out of it.
But the skeptic’s election is also a confirmation of an international turn in the politics of warming as much as it is a sharp or distinctly American break. Yes, a global renewables boom is well underway, with worldwide investment in clean energy reaching $2 trillion this year and total solar capacity doubling since 2022. But the climate logic of that transition increasingly goes unspoken in all but the most committed corners, replaced by chin-scratching about energy politics. Governments have retreated from even their legally binding promises to decarbonize, trusting markets to deliver comparatively meager emissions reductions instead, and activists have been unable to generate meaningful public outrage at the walkback.
Partly this is a sign of some success. When Trump was first elected in 2016, clean energy was something of a niche concern, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer pointed out last week; now it is “central to modern economic development and to geopolitics” almost everywhere, even those places where political debate has moved on.
In Europe, for instance, where politicians terrified of “greenlash” have pulled back from their climate push, emissions nevertheless fell by more than 8 percent last year — nearly as fast as in the year of pandemic lockdowns, though probably not fast enough to meet the most ambitious global targets. Globally, national policy commitments are actually lagging behind market forecasts for renewables, though forecasts aren’t destiny: Many of the tech companies that won admiration for their world-leading decarbonization plans have watched their emissions rise instead — some by as much as 30 percent in four years, thanks to the astronomical energy demands of artificial intelligence.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.zenith slots