The events of the past few days are shocking in their novelty—the glory of seeing the first Black Democrat ever elected to the Senate from the South, the shame of seeing a President incite a mob to storm the Capitol. Who knows what drama will come next, except for one constant: the unrelenting rise in the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and with them the disruption of the earth’s physical systems. This happens more slowly than the sad spectacles of our debased political life, but not that much more slowly. As this new year dawns, we’re precisely halfway through the six-decade cycle that could delineate the crucial years of the climate crisis.
Global warming has been a public problem since only about 1990. Scientists had worked on it for decades prior, and we now know that the oil companies also had been studying the impact of their products on the climate. But it was James Hansen’s congressional testimony, in 1988, that brought the issue into the open, and it was the Rio Earth Summit, in 1992, that marked the first halting attempts at something like international negotiations to address it. 2050 has now emerged as the consensus target for many countries to go carbon-neutral. That date won’t mark the end of the climate crisis, but it’s useful as a final deadline for the transition to a new economic and energy regime that respects the physical limits of the planet. So, three decades down and three to go.
Of those decades, the two most important are the one we’ve just come through and the one we’re now entering. The nineteen-nineties and the two-thousands were essentially wasted: oil-company propaganda and accompanying political muscle made sweeping action impossible. The epic failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, in 2009, and of the cap-and-trade climate legislation on Capitol Hill, in 2010, closed that era.
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