Climate: Who Dies, Who Fights, Who Surrenders, Who Sabotages
"Canadians will have to prepare for a future that's 5 C hotter, according to a new report summarizing the latest science on climate change," says a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report on a Canadian government study, and that sounds mildly alarming if you're not up on climate science. If you are, it translates into something approximating: "welcome to the extremely violent world we are not preventing and you and yours may not be surviving; we your government are cool with that; don't wake up as we passionately devote ourselves to Alberta's short-term oil profits instead of the longterm fate of life on earth and the future of our nation." The climate news is huge, urgent, and muffled in this kind of sane-sounding framing this summer when a climate-caused glacier collapse killed about two thousand people dramatically, visibly, while extreme heat in Europe quietly killed about ten times.
As you read further, the CBC piece nonchalantly drops that "In Nunavut, warming in winter could exceed 10 C." Nunavut is the indigenous-governed province created in 1999, and this has to mean its utter destruction. That's genocide against Canada's indigenous Arctic peoples; the place would be unimaginably different and the peoples' elegant cold-weather adaptation that is central to cultural stories, skills, and practices would be obsolete. There was a book by Philip Gourevich about the Rwandan genocide of 1994 titled We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda; this is a report that could be titled We Would Like to Inform You That You, Your Descendants, and the Very Place That Shaped Your People Will Be Destroyed But Oil Will Be Briefly Profitable for Some Canadian Corporations.
The Canadian report seems to regard this as an inevitability rather than something to act to prevent. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit climate leader from Nunavut I had the honor of meeting in British Columbia in 2025, wrote a book titled The Right to Be Cold that begins "For the first ten years of my life, I traveled only by dog team." She describes being wrapped up and secured atop the dog sled where she would "view the vast expanses of Arctic sky and feel the crunching of the snow." The right to be cold is being destroyed.
Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney, was notably good on climate some years back, especially when he was head of the Bank of England and then United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, which means he knows exactly how damaging his actions are. In his new job, he has relentlessly pursued oil profit. The Guardian reported in November, "Mark Carney has agreed an energy deal with Alberta centred on plans for a new heavy oil pipeline reaching from the province’s oil sands to the Pacific coast, a politically volatile project that is expected to face stiff opposition.The move proved politically damaging within hours, with the minister of Canadian culture, Steven Guilbeault, who is the former environment minister, announcing he would leave cabinet." There have been valiant and sometimes successful campaigns by British Columbia's indigenous people and allies to prevent Alberta's pipelines from reaching across the province to the ocean for export.
Some propose that the government text addressing catastrophic warming was released late last Friday to minimize attention. The text states, "A scenario roughly representative of current global climate policies in which global emissions of greenhouse gases stabilize and then decline towards the end of the century corresponds to a future climate for Canada that is far from benign. Under this scenario, Canada is projected to warm through the century, with an average temperature increase (mean estimate) of 5°C by 2081 to 2100 relative to 1850 to 1900, while there is a greater than 50% chance that warming will exceed 10°C in much of Nunavut in winter." Don't ever stop being shocked by the idea of ten degrees or the normalization of apocalypse.
That's about future climate chaos. Present-day climate chaos made headlines when an August 26 glacier collapse in the Himalayas resulted on a wall of water, mud, and stone that scoured out a narrow valley, swept away bridges and buildings and killed hundreds. It was dramatic, visual, sudden, unpredictable, exactly the kind of weather catastrophe that makes news, or that the news industry knows how to cover, and that readers and viewers pay attention to. I don't believe there was a glacier-collapse catastrophe on this scale before, but there's no reason to think this was an isolated incident rather than the first of many to come. The death toll from this summer's extreme heat in Europe was many times larger, but there's no comparable visibility and drama: someone dies alone in their home or collapses on the sidewalk and gets taken to the hospital where they fail to recover, and that multiplies by the thousands. The estimates now are that the extreme heat killed about 35,000, but those are preliminary and incomplete results and the real total may be quite a bit higher.
You know I like good news, but this is not the week for it when it comes to climate. The Canadian report wasn't the only dismaying reality check out there. There's been new attention in the last few weeks to the reality that worldwide we are soon going to overshoot 1.5 C degrees. Hitting 1.5 degrees itself is less alarming than the fact that the overheating doesn't stop there. It's worth remembering that the reason that 1.5 C was set as the threshold in the 2015 Paris Climate Treaty was because a battle was fought from below at the meeting, which had convened with the intention of setting that threshold at 2 degrees. Had 2 degrees been in the treaty, we might've passed 1.5 with little notice. The chant was "1.5 to stay alive" and the leadership came from the Climate Vulnerable Forum, mostly global south nations and island nations declaring that two degrees was a death sentence for them.
My friend and Oil Change International Colleague Renato Redentor Constantino, who lives and works in the Philippines, was at the heart of that campaign (and he invited me in to witness some of the work of the Climate Vulnerable Forum in Paris). He wrote about how it unfolded in his magnificent essay about the campaign for the Not Too Late climate anthology Thelma Young Lutunatabua and I edited a few years ago, writing,
In the six years after the unsuccessful Denmark climate conference, the powerful exerted tremendous effort to keep a tiny number, 1.5, out of United Nations documents. One and half degrees Celsius represents what science advises as the maximum allowable rise in average global temperature relative to preindustrial temperature levels. Beyond that lurks menacing outcomes. For a huge number of developing countries, in particular the coalition of island states, the group of Least Developed Countries, and the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), fractions of a degree mattered. The figure of 1.5°C versus 2°C meant the difference between survival and annihilation. Many considered 1.5° unachievable not because of science but of politics. Representatives of elite international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) viewed the 1.5° limit with disdain. Some even lobbied leaders supporting vulnerable country governments to quash efforts to advance the more ambitious climate goal. They claimed that this was in order not to harm “global” consensus. On the other side, a few leaders of social movements that stridently supported the 1.5° limit in principle sneered at the notion that developed countries would ever be persuaded to adopt the target... Soon, the Eiffel Tower would light up with a message blazing, “1.5°C.” By the middle of the second and final week of the negotiations, even Saudi Arabia, on behalf of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, would cave.
"1.5 to stay alive" was the chant that accompanied the campaign. It was, like so much of contemporary life, a radical idea that became an accepted norm.
The 1.5 threshold was repeated in a 2018 scientific report, saying we had twelve years to halve fossil fuel use to stay under 1.5 degrees of warming from pre-industrial levels. We're now almost nine years into that. Remarkable things have happened: I think 2018 would be astonished by a lot of the renewables news from 2026, free electricity at midday in solar-booming Australia, China's carbon emissions declining (slightly) thanks to renewables, California radically reducing its natural gas use to generate electricity because of a gorgeous combination of solar, wind, hydro, and battery storage, the rise of electric cars in much of the world, Texas hitting 37% renewable electricity generation, balcony solar, the ever-increasing efficiency and cheapness of solar panels, the proliferation of electric cars and e-bikes, the auto-traffic limits imposed on central Paris and London (with major benefits to air quality). But Canada, the USA, and the United Kingdom seem to be backsliding. (Britain's new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, is apparently opening up more North Sea oil extraction, an equivalent to Carney's support for a new pipeline when it comes to failing on climate goals.)
It's not good news, and I know a lot of people would say that setting a goal you failed to meet was pointless or had failed. I'd argue that the goal was a north star for a lot of climate activism and a pressure point on a lot of governments; it did not do everything it was supposed to do, but that doesn't mean it did nothing; decisions were made because 1.5 rather than 2 was set as a threshold and in which a threshhold was set at all, and there was a point much earlier in all this in which scientists talked about 3 or 5 degrees without alarm, while assuming it would all unfold much more slowly; the science to understand and the technologies to obey science have been evolving together. (I spend a lot of time talking about the spaces between everything and nothing, saved and doomed, perfect and evil, because a lot of all-or-nothing fans swerve from one to the other.) The same is true of the Biden Administration's Inflation Reduction Act, as I noted a few newsletters ago (citing Dr. Leah Stokes's excellent research demonstrating that many parts of the Inflation Reduction Act are still in place, still doing good work).
Climate disasters are getting bigger and more frequent, as was widely anticipated. There's often a hope that one of them will be a wakeup call, but a lot of us are wide-awake and a lot of the rest are deeply committed to ignoring or exacerbating this crisis. And at the far edges of the world, from melting permafrost in the Arctic to rising sea level on the low-lying South Pacific Islands, people aren't just awake, they're facing the impacts head-on. So is the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which just released a report on overshooting 1.5. It states:
Even though global warming is set to cross 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, likely within the next few years, the goal remains limiting warming to this level. Every fraction of a degree avoided and every year by which overshoot is
shortened will save lives, protect ecosystems and reduce economic losses. As the UNEP Limiting Overshoot report shows, there are no good outcomes above 1.5°C. Extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss and sea-level rise will intensify.
Some Small Island Developing States and low-lying coastal cities could be partially or completely submerged. Risks of tipping points will grow. Human health, food and water security, cities and infrastructure will come under
increasing strain. These impacts will not be distributed equally, and some losses will be irreversible even if global temperatures eventually decline. So, we must hold fast to global commitments under the Paris Agreement, try to return to below 1.5°C by the end of the century and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
That is, the focus now is on how we can return to 1.5 degrees, how we can literally go back rather than forward on greenhouse gas emissions, the subject of the report. We know how. We have the solutions. We have the science. We have the technology. We have the popular will in that the great majority of people on earth take climate change seriously and support action to address it. But we also have the obstacles that are a powerful minority invested in or benefitting from the fossil fuel industry and using their power to obstruct the transition.
This includes the tech companies frenziedly building data centers that require vast amounts of energy while assuring us that somehow AI will solve climate change (when we don't need new ideas; we need to act on the trustworthy ideas we already have). The pretense that we are waiting for a solution yet to be invented or tried is nothing but a form of delay and avoidance. It's a way to justify continuing with the harm and preventing the energy transition. (One pet focus of tech guys is carbon sequestration, which does not currently work in any meaningful way and doesn't seem likely to in the foreseeable future. The fantasy we can pull carbon out of the air in meaningful quantities becomes an excuse for putting it in the air in a "have some poison, because surely we'll invent an antidote soon" kind of way.)
In response to the UNEP overshoot report, Dr Rufino Varea, Director of the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network, declared, “We cannot allow the inevitability of crossing 1.5°C to become an excuse for accepting a hotter world. Overshoot may now be unavoidable, but how high temperatures rise and how long they remain there are still determined by the choices governments make today. Every fraction of a degree we prevent matters. Every year we shorten overshoot matters. For Pacific peoples, those choices will be measured in what we are still able to save.” Another person at the network, Dr Sindra Sharma, said “Crossing 1.5°C does not make 1.5°C irrelevant. It makes the responsibility to act even greater."
Fossil fuel decline appears to be inevitable because renewables are a cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, more universally distributed source of energy, and it is in fact underway. Its expansiont requires converting or rather replacing innumerable machines that run on oil, gas, or coal to electricity, but that is underway with successful test flights of an electric passenger plane and electrified heavy construction equipment including big trucks deployed in some parts of the world, along with work on electric-powered industrial uses requiring high temperatures. There's a bonus in that it turns out burning fossil fuel is a really wasteful way to power machines; a huge amount of it becomes useless heat, meaning that you do not have to replace fossil fuel 1:1; you gain significant efficiency by electrifying (along with other efficiencies – for example 40% or so of international shipping is just moving fossil fuels around). Meanwhile, Trump's war in Iran has underscored that fossil fuel is unreliable because subject to geopolitics in ways that locally produced energy is not, speeding the transition in some places for reasons other than climate.
“Transitioning away from fossil fuels is thus a key investment in resilience and public welfare" says the UNEP overshoot report. I believe the age of fossil fuel will end, but the difference between a swift and a slow transition is profound. The climate change think tank EG3, looking to the future, notes, " The global oil system is entering its endgame: a period of structural transition as demand weakens, becomes more concentrated and harder to predict. The drivers that pushed oil demand past its peak in advanced economies over two decades ago ... Taken together, these trends point toward a global plateau, and likely peak, around the early 2030s. Oil supply shocks, such as currently happening due to the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, may bring the turning point forward." ,
What to do? For us in the United States, the midterms represent a chance to take back Congress, rein in the excesses of the Trump Administration, and begin to steer the US back toward alignment with scientific realities and protection of the environment on all scales from individual parks and preserves to national policies (and maybe go after Trump's attacks on wind power and huge gifts to the fossil fuel industry). The Trump Administration is stealing money from the national parks for Trump's pet projects in Washington, D.C., and otherwise running wild with the money that Congress is supposed to control – but the Republican-led Congress has surrendered. Seeing Congress reassert its power of the purse would be bracing.
A lot of talk about the future assumes that Trump will last out his term and the Republican Party that has abandoned every principle to follow and obey him will have an afterlife when he's gone. But glacier collapses and broken records remind us that past performance is no assurance of future results, as the phrase goes. Climate scientists have warned us for decades about the results of messing with the upper atmosphere; the science of politics is nowhere near as exact.
