The Optimistic Climate Report That Might Be Too Good to Be True

A funny thing happened last week. A climate report revealed genuinely good news about U.S. emissions. Or did it?

“U.S. Carbon Emissions Fell in 2023 as Coal Use Tumbled to New Lows,” The New York Times reported. “The falling emissions, driven largely by retirements of dirty, coal-fired power plants, put U.S. climate pollution at its lowest level since 1991,” CNN added. NBC’s headline was cautious—“Good news, bad news: U.S. emissions shrank last year, but very slowly”—but the lede was more optimistic: “Carbon emissions shrank in 2023 even as the economy grew, a sign the U.S. is plodding toward a more sustainable future.”

That was the takeaway of a lot of the coverage. As Robinson Meyer of Heatmap wrote, “It’s the first time since the pandemic began that the American economy has, as the phrase goes, ‘decoupled’—experienced an expanding economy and falling emissions at the same time.” These articles acknowledged that progress remains troublingly slow—the pace isn’t enough to meet the targets set by the Paris Agreement—but characterized the report as proof that we can grow the economy while reducing emissions.

Not so fast. It really depends on what part of the Rhodium report you look at. To quote the summary itself: “This decline in emissions was driven by an 8% drop in emissions in the power sector and a 4% drop from residential and commercial buildings.… In the transportation sector, the highest-emitting sector, emissions rose by 1.6% from 2022 levels, and in the industrial sector, the second highest-emitting sector, there was a 1% increase in emissions.” That’s a little less encouraging.

Consider the 4 percent decrease from buildings. How’d that happen? “In the buildings sector, a milder-than-average winter reduced fuel demand and led to lower overall emissions, since the majority of homes still rely on natural gas, fuel oil, and propane for space heating.” This is a tough one to know how to evaluate. On the one hand, any drop in emissions is good, in that it strictly adds less to the total emissions budget. On the other hand, another way of phrasing this would be to say we reduced emissions by warming the world enough that it was a mild winter, which, given that our buildings still rely on fossil fuels, reduced emissions. That is not a pattern we want to repeat ad infinitum, expecting further success; there are, after all, some knock-on effects from warmer winters, including water crises, ecosystem and agricultural instability, and hotter summers (which can also lead to increased fuel consumption).

Then there’s the power sector. Coal declining is doubtless good news, not just for greenhouse gas emissions but also for human health. But the report also says that “natural gas generation grew more than twice as fast as renewable generation did, year-on-year.” And wind turbine installation rates actually seem to be declining relative to 2021 levels. Meanwhile, the report continues, “the U.S. is on track for record dry gas production in 2023, and crude oil production looks to rival if not exceed 2019 record levels as well.”

And then there’s the other big asterisk. “The researchers looked at planet-warming emissions generated by transportation, electricity, industry and buildings,” The New York Times noted, “but did not include pollution from agriculture, which accounts for roughly 10 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases.”

There’s little reason to think that U.S. agricultural emissions have gone down. In fact, we already know that agricultural emissions can rise while others fall, because that seems to be what happened in 2020, when Covid hit. Between 1990 and 2021, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, carbon dioxide emissions from agriculture increased by 16.2 percent, methane emissions increased by 15.7 percent, and nitrous oxide emissions increased by 3.7 percent. And emissions specifically from enteric fermentation—i.e., from the guts of the animals producing red meat and dairy—have increased 7.2 percent over roughly the same period.

None of this is to say that the way the Rhodium findings are being reported is wrong. The top-line summaries, however, emphasize the progress rather than the more troubling signs. Even with all the caveats, Meyer writes, “the analysis nonetheless shows that climate progress in the U.S. is holding its own, just as the Inflation Reduction Act and new Environmental Protection Agency rules are set to kick in in years to come.”

I struggle to match that optimism. None of the sectors where emissions have likely increased are easy to reform, from a political perspective. The sectors where emissions did decrease may not maintain those reductions. Then too, it’s hard to ignore other headlines coming out this week that may have a significant effect on these trends going forward. Hot (so to speak) on the heels of former President Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucus, a poll released Tuesday showed Trump leading Biden 45–37 percent in the key state of Georgia. That same day, Politico reported that team Trump may “show less restraint” in a second term than in his first when it comes to gutting environmental protections and climate policy. That’s in part due to the influence of Project 2025, a policy draft put together by conservative groups for “Day One.” (You can read about Project 2025 and its implications for climate, trans rights, schools, and more in TNR’s extensive coverage of the plan.)

Time will tell how this report from the Rhodium Group ages. It’s a frustrating feature of climate coverage that one of the most important factors in evaluating the meaning of emissions reports often isn’t the climate or emissions data itself but rather the crystal-ball vagaries of American politics. The climate-funding progress of the past few years is real. But the IRA is a law—and an imperfect one, at that. It’s not destiny.

Good News/Bad News

Stat of the Week
11,000 pieces

That’s possibly the average microplastic ingestion of an American adult each year, according to a profoundly disturbing piece from The Washington Post on microplastics in food.

What I’m Reading

Fossil Fuel Corporations Are Faking Grassroots Support

Fossil fuel companies have used insights on consumer trust from P.R. firm Edelman to “turn workers into a positive public face for fossil fuels, obscuring the role of the profit-hungry executives who actually pull the strings,” Adam M. Lowenstein reports. The strategy has proven politically profitable.

“Energy Citizens,” an ultimately successful astroturf campaign launched by the American Petroleum Institute while Edelman was the organization’s single largest contractor, hewed closely to Edelman’s proprietary insights about trust. The effectiveness of Energy Citizens, which involved making oil and gas workers the “human face” of the fossil fuel industry to create the impression of widespread grassroots support, contributed to the defeat of US climate legislation in 2010.…

According to Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, such examples illustrate how Edelman has used its insights—under the guise of studying public trust—to help the fossil fuel industry fight climate action. “When Edelman finds that engagement from employees and ‘people like me’ is an important part of developing trust in corporations, you immediately see those tactics being deployed on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute and companies like TransCanada,” said Meisel.

Read Adam M. Lowenstein’s report at Jacobin.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

“Time is running out” is a strange sentence. It’s always true (shush, physicists—I mean from the human perspective), and yet it’s always anxiety-inducing. It’s perfectly calibrated to make the human brain tune out whatever comes next. Time’s running out for me to do it? Great, don’t tell me what it is! I don’t want to know! I’ve practically missed the chance already!

Yet time really is running out if the Biden administration means to fulfill its promises to counter climate change and environmental degradation. The climate clock is ticking: Data released Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service showed that world average temperatures reached 1.48 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in 2023—shockingly close to the 1.5 degree limit (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) set in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The political clock is ticking, as well: With November’s election looming, it’s far from certain that Biden will prevail over the likely Republican nominee, former president and current four-case criminal defendant Donald Trump. If Trump wins, he’s likely to re-withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement and gut environmental protections—a process that could be further abetted by a Republican Congress.

The theme in last week’s newsletter was hope. Hope certainly hasn’t run out. As The Guardian’s Damian Carrington reminded readers this week, while the Copernicus Climate Change Service expects us to hit the 1.5 degree mark in the next year, climate scientists won’t consider the target definitively smashed until temperatures are “consistently above 1.5 degrees Celsius.” And as I emphasized last week, even if we cross that milestone, “every fraction of a degree,” in the words of U.N. climate scientist Jim Skea, will matter. Each of those fractions of a degree will be a major victory counted in lives, livelihoods, species, and communities saved.

It is, however, time to get ruthlessly practical about the next 12 months. TNR’s Kate Aronoff has outlined a to-do list for the Biden administration—not just to get reelected but also to finalize a large number of environmental rules so that it will be harder for Republicans to roll them back. As you may recall, the Trump administration did just about everything it could to set fire to the environment on its way out the door in 2020, finalizing more than two dozen new giveaways to fossil fuel companies and curtailments of existing environmental policies, during the period between Trump losing the election and Inauguration Day. Biden’s administration might want to take this time to be just as industrious as his predecessor was in wrecking the planet, and protect as much of it as he can in the months that remain.

In a new piece published Wednesday, Kate adds another key item to the to-do list:

The Department of Justice prosecuted fewer corporations in fiscal year 2022 than at any point since 1994, per an analysis published by the watchdog group Public Citizen in October. The overwhelming majority of corporations it did prosecute (81 percent) had fewer than 50 employees, according to the department’s annual report; just 7 percent had more than 1,000. By its own estimation, enforcement efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency reduced, treated, or eliminated fewer pollutants than such efforts have at any point in the last decade. Also in fiscal year 2023, which started in October 2022, the EPA charged fewer criminal defendants than it has at any point in the last decade.

While EPA enforcements increased last year, “the bar for improvement,” Kate wrote, “was shockingly low.… In fiscal year 2022, EPA civil enforcement cases plummeted to their lowest levels in 22 years, according to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project. Jail time for criminal defendants reached an all-time low. Fewer criminal cases were opened in 2022 than at any point since 1992.” While there are demonstrable reasons for that—such as the sharp reduction in agency staff under the Trump administration and stinginess from Congress—there’s a limited amount of time to enforce existing rules before a combination of Supreme Court decisions and elections could make those agencies’ tasks much, much harder.

At the governmental level, policy is about how one uses the time that one has. Politics is about buying more of it. The latter typically outweighs the former in an election year. But if Biden believes, as he has previously stated, that climate change is “literally an existential threat,” his administration is going to have to go full-out in the next 12 months to pursue both.

Good News/Bad News

In a nice break from more villainous tech stories, “a team of beaver scientists and Google engineers have been teaching an algorithm to spot the rodents’ infrastructure on satellite images,” reports Ben Goldfarb at Mother Jones. Beavers do a lot of cool things for the environment, and scientists hope to learn more about that from this A.I. effort. Read the full piece: It’s packed with amusing tidbits like A.I. thinking pavement cul-de-sacs are beaver ponds.


Fuel efficiency for new cars seems to be stalled, largely because of the American love affair with SUVs.

Stat of the Week
28

That’s the number of billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023. You guessed it: It’s a record. No year going back to the beginning of data collection in 1980, and adjusting for inflation, has seen that many billion-dollar extreme weather events.

What I’m Reading

The war zone in Gaza will leave a legacy of hidden health risks

The Israeli government’s massive months-long assault on Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 attacks has already killed a staggering number of people. But as Saqib Rahim reports for Grist, the death toll could rise dramatically even if a cease-fire began tomorrow. Pulverizing this many buildings has surely released toxic debris into the air, including asbestos in some cases. And that’s to say nothing of other environmental degradation:

Systematic research after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States was among the first to link exposure to such a mix of detritus to pulmonary and respiratory disease and cancer.… In principle, making post-conflict zones livable again requires rigorous field sampling, remediation of pollution hotspots, and health surveillance to watch for disease trends. In practice, these things usually get skipped in the exhaustion that follows hostilities …

Without ground access to Gaza, observers are relying on remote sensing and publicly available information to measure environmental impacts to the Strip. Using satellite analysis, He Yin, an assistant professor of geography at Kent State University, reckons the fighting has damaged 15 to 29 percent of Gaza’s arable land. The PAX report identifies a plume of black smoke from a soda factory, suggesting burning plastics, and heavy damage at an industrial campus that makes pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, plastics and other chemical goods. In November, the New York Times observed a huge fire at a water-treatment plant, a frightening development in one of the most water-stressed places in the world.

Read Saqib Rahim’s full report at Grist.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Twenty-one species were finally, after much deliberation, declared extinct in the United States last year. Only 11 other species had been declared extinct in the prior half-century. 2023 was the warmest year ever recorded for Earth’s average temperature. Some researchers think 2024 could be worse. The Biden administration made $382 million auctioning off oil-drilling leases on December 20—part of record oil production on Democrats’ watch. By the end of 2024, the country could be preparing for another Trump presidency—likely gutting environmental protections and re-withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement.

Yet perhaps counterintuitively, an emerging theme as 2023 closed out and made way for 2024 was that of hope. “Here’s How Bad Climate Change Will Get in the U.S.—and Why There’s Still Hope,” was how Wired announced the results of the Fifth National Climate Assessment in November. “Hope is a discipline,” declared one Guardian headline published New Year’s Eve atop an interview with Nathan Baring, one of the young plaintiffs suing the U.S. government for having “willfully ignored” warnings about fossil fuels. (The case was filed in 2015 and still hasn’t gone to trial.) And then there’s Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World, being released next week to notable press interest. Ritchie argues in interviews in The New York Times and The Guardian this week that, while “it has been an incredibly bad year,” we’ve made more progress than we sometimes acknowledge on climate change, and reframing existential dread as “How can I try to contribute to accelerating the good outpacing the bad?” may be more productive.

Hope is a good thing. Climate “doomerism,” numerous writers have pointed out, is destructive—giving people the false sense that there’s nothing left to fight for, when in reality “every fraction of a degree” matters for communities, species, food systems, and livelihoods. To put it another way: As a practical matter it’s hard for humans to mobilize at either an individual or a collective level when they feel hopeless, and as a scientific matter, portraying the future as a dead-end done deal isn’t accurate.

Hope is searingly politically relevant, and also complicated: The politics of hope run directly counter to the politics of fear, which have a track record of empowering regressive nationalist and racist movements. But hope can also be abused. There is a rich history among rich nations of pushing fossil fuel phaseout ever further into the future, hoping that unproven or unscalable technological solutions will suck carbon out of the air and take care of the problem for us.

Nor can hope alone, as TNR’s Kate Aronoff argued in a vital piece last spring, be expected to fix our dysfunctional climate politics:

On one hand, it’s understandable that climate advocates would think about the best way to communicate about climate change. On the other, fixating on finding the perfect tone for climate communication mistakes messaging and mindset for a theory of change. Getting off fossil fuels requires replacing the lifeblood of capitalism on a stunningly quick timeline, and replacing it with alternatives just now coming into their own. Doing that isn’t so much an issue of pessimism or optimism but of political economy…. The reason there is now a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” per the latest IPCC report, isn’t because some ill-defined mass of climate-concerned people has been insufficiently hopeful in public. It’s because the people who want to pass adequate climate policies have significantly less power and money than the people who want to obstruct such policies.

This last sentence points to another thing worth remembering: Hope probably shouldn’t be used as a substitute for accountability. A lot of companies have made a lot of money cooking the planet. They knew they were doing it, and they funded misinformation campaigns to keep citizens and their governments from intervening to stop them. And while one could argue that fixating on blame can be counterproductive, naming and blaming could be very helpful if it means people stop wanting to be associated with or do the lobbying and marketing for the entities that got us here. Cultural shifts are important for political change. Then, too, the money needed to save the world has to come from somewhere: Making major polluters pay to clean up the mess is a good start.

As we begin the new year, I like reading these hopeful pieces. I also wonder how they will age: whether editors like me will be greenlighting hopeful pieces a year from now or whether the prospect of a second Trump administration will blitz all this climate discourse into oblivion. Hope doesn’t mean a lot without action, and the precise causal relationship between the two can be tricky to unpack (as a multitude of widely circulated aphorisms attest). Let’s hope 2024 goes well. Let’s not count on it.

Good News/Bad News

Electric vehicles just got more affordable: You can now get instant rebates on electric vehicles rather than waiting until tax-filing time, thanks to a change in federal incentives that took effect this week.

The Great Lakes came into 2024 with the least amount of ice they’ve had in 50 years.

Stat of the Week

305 days

… until Election Day 2024, the outcome of which could have a gargantuan
effect on U.S. climate policy, emissions, and climate change around the world.

What I’m Reading

Strawberry Case Study: What If Farmers Had to Pay for Water?

The fees levied on irrigation in California’s bountiful Pajaro Valley are working, offering hope that similar systems could help address the West’s water crisis, as well as water crises across the U.S. and in fact all over the globe.

Experts from as far away as China and Egypt are traveling to the valley to study the system. But replicating it elsewhere could face major challenges. For one thing, “People don’t like taxes,” said Nicholas Brozovic, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska. “There’s nothing mysterious about that.”

New research on the program revealed a direct connection between paying for the groundwater and conserving it: A 20 percent increase in the price of groundwater has resulted in a 20 percent decrease in the extraction of groundwater.

One reason experts see Pajaro as a model: Despite the high price of water, agriculture in the region is thriving.

Read Coral Davenport’s report at The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Climate coverage is often caricatured as being a deluge of bad news. The truth is more complicated. While 2023 certainly had its fair share of frightening developments, there were also signs of hope. And some of the bad news came with a silver lining: It highlighted systems that, in theory, should be really easy to fix.

The Good

After a rough start to the year—including new drilling projects—climate campaigners claimed a massive victory in New York state with the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act, which requires the public New York Power Authority to build its own renewables projects if the private sector fails to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030. Getting the bill passed was a “multiyear, mammoth effort,” TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted in May. The proposal had already failed in prior legislative sessions, but the New York City Democratic Socialists of America mounted primary challenges against any incumbent Democrat they deemed insufficiently supportive of the bill. And despite the sometimes shaky rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act, Kate explained, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation helped the BPRA prevail at last by allowing public utilities to take advantage of tax breaks for renewables.

This may sound like a development only relevant to a single state. But the BPRA’s influence, Liza Featherstone argued, could extend well beyond New York’s borders. The law, she wrote, “could potentially be the boldest challenge yet to the fossil fuel industry. That’s because of the principle it establishes: that the state should be empowered to provide clean energy if the private sector fails to.”

In September, the Biden administration announced plans to create an “American Climate Corps,” employing people in conservation, resilience, clean energy, and other projects. “According to a source familiar with the design of the program,” Kate reported, “the first jobs will likely start hiring next summer or early fall. The White House has set a goal of employing 20,000 people in the first year.”

Also this fall, the United Auto Workers prevailed in getting General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis to include electric vehicle battery manufacturers in their bargaining unit. That may seem somewhat orthogonal to the issue of climate change, but, as Liza argued, it could have long-lasting political ramifications, like “ending the culture war on electric vehicles and robbing the Republicans of anti-climate talking points.”

The Bad

I’m not going to try to recap all the studies that came out this year with dire prognoses—including several suggesting that global warming and polar melting and species extinction are proceeding faster than expected. If you read this newsletter, you’ve seen them already. The real question is how to respond to all this.

The Inflation Reduction Act is clearly working in some ways, even if it can’t stimulate the notoriously difficult offshore wind market the way people had hoped. “Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending renewables will achieve a level of self-sufficiency that has never been demanded of coal, oil, and gas,” Kate suggested earlier this year. The bigger problem for the long-term future of climate policy, she argued in a separate piece, is that a lot of people don’t seem to know that the IRA is working:

A Washington Post–University of Maryland poll conducted in mid-July found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of [Biden’s] handling of climate change; 71 percent heard “a little” or “nothing at all” about the IRA. At least two-thirds are broadly unfamiliar with its component parts, including electric vehicle subsidies and tax credits for wind turbine and solar panel manufacturing.… Just 37 percent of voters approve of President Biden’s handling of infrastructure issues. Only 41 percent approve of how he’s handled jobs and unemployment, while a dismal 26 percent approve of how he’s dealt with inflation.

That all spells trouble in the years to come.

If you missed it, check out Kate’s proposed solution: Pool Party Progressivism.

And then there’s America’s perennial preference to spend money on defense rather than climate policy. The defense industry could be converted into an engine for the new green economy, Indigo Olivier wrote early in the year. Instead, the United States has directed money to Ukraine and Israel while leaving climate change–vulnerable nations in the global south to fend for themselves.

The gruesome feedback loop became particularly apparent this fall, Molly Taft argued:

The U.S. military—which is estimated to emit more carbon dioxide than many countries—is mobilizing to provide even more support to Israel. Iran, a supporter of Hamas, is the world’s biggest fossil fuel producer that has not signed the Paris Agreement; inside its borders, its citizens are facing catastrophic levels of air pollution and are being forced to migrate as droughts, storms, and floods destroy the land. We keep ruining our planet as we kill each other, and one murderous cycle feeds into another.

Meanwhile, oil companies have profited tremendously from this slaughter. They’re still getting new drilling projects approved and new leases from the federal government, by the way.

The Lesson

A string of especially frustrating, nonsensical bad news this year made it clearer than ever that some systems just need to change. These aren’t giant, arcane mysteries that would require three dozen policy wonks working around the clock, or a new executive agency, to solve. We know what needs to be done. For example: Stop letting oil companies sue governments for policies that cause them to lose money. Stop growing wildly unsustainable crops in the water-parched American Southwest. (Alfalfa for cows in Saudi Arabia? Really?) Just get rid of gas stoves. (Aside from members of “the GOP’s pro–childhood asthma caucus,” much of the public may be persuadable, particularly if someone gives them an induction stove to test-drive.) Ban pesticide and herbicide use on lawns. (We can discuss banning lawns entirely and banning the gas-guzzling machines used for their maintenance later.) Kick executives and lobbyists from the plastics, oil and gas, and meat industries out of U.N. talks. Put a special tax on private planes. Stop expecting businesses—particularly the ones that got us into this mess—to save us from global warming. The enduring message of 2023 is that we know what we need to do. The task is to generate sufficient political momentum to do it.

Good News/Bad News

Stat of the Week

12%

That’s the proportion of bird species that have gone extinct due to human activity in the past 120,000 years, according to a new study.

What I’m Reading

It’s time to start planning for the next thousand years

Some inspiration to close out 2023. In lieu of giving up, in the face of shrinking temporal windows and soaring temperatures, perhaps it’s time to reframe the problem:

It’s easy to lose hope after a year like the last one, which saw Amazonian drought, rampant deforestation, coral reef die-offs and the hottest recorded year on Earth. But reversing this will not be the job of a single generation. It will take many decades, if not centuries, of what [Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication] called “cathedral projects.” “The climate needs big, public, audacious goals that everyone can contribute to,” he argues. “Cathedrals were not completed in the lifetime of anyone starting them, but communities bought into these projects.” Everything from rebuilding coral reefs and reforesting the Amazon to repowering the world’s energy system and capturing gigatons of carbon dioxide could be the cathedrals of our time. We should portray them as bold, transcendent projects for the collective good that encompass generations—not only in the dry, dense language of technical climate reports.

Read Michael J. Coren’s full column at The Washington Post.

Mona Ainu’u is the minister of natural resources for Niue, an island nation of about 1,600 people in the South Pacific. On Monday, she was reportedly in tears as she reacted to the latest draft produced by the U.N. climate conference, which omitted the words “fossil fuel phaseout.” “My 12-year-old, what am I going to say to her when I come back?” Ainu’u asked. Niue is particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise, which could easily jeopardize its fresh water supplies.

That same day, another 12-year-old named Licypriya Kangujam stormed the COP28 stage bearing a sign calling for an end to fossil fuels. “Millions of children like me are losing their lives, losing their parents, and losing their homes due to climate disasters,” shouted Kangujam, who lives with her family in Noida, a city about 12 miles southeast of the Indian capital of New Delhi.

“We’re very proud of the enthusiasm of the young people who have joined us at COP28, and let’s give her another round of applause,” said COP28 director general Majid Al Suwaidi, after Kangujam was hauled out. Then, according to Kangujam’s social media feed, her COP28 badge was revoked and she was kicked out of the conference.

On Wednesday, headlines trumpeted the “historic” and “unprecedented” deal that negotiators at COP28 reached after working throughout the night, finally agreeing on a text that calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” It didn’t say “phaseout,” as many vulnerable nations wanted, nor is the agreement binding, but it was the first time ever that a U.N. climate agreement has explicitly called for a decrease in fossil fuels. As such, it will be perceived in many quarters as a victory. Yet veterans on this topic know that this outcome isn’t enough: “Overall, I think this is a stronger text than the prior versions we have seen,” the U.N. Foundation’s senior adaptation adviser, Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, told Al Jazeera. “But it falls short in mobilising the financing needed to meet those targets.”

In the past week, a lot of ink has been spilled on how the U.N. climate conferences got this bad and whether there’s any way to make them better. But it’s hard to think of a better encapsulation of what’s wrong with the conferences than this tale of two 12-year-olds against the backdrop of 2,400 COP28 badges awarded to participants from the fossil fuel industry.

The first Conference of the Parties, or COP, held in 1995, involved a few thousand “diplomats and scientists,” The Washington Post reported this week. In recent years, that has ballooned to an 84,000-person traveling circus that business lobbyists now see as a prime networking opportunity. “The negotiations, we’re not really part of that,” Chamber of Commerce senior vice president for policy Marty Durbin told the Post. “But we do have the opportunity to meet with officials and other companies and dig into these critical issues.”

How best to kick these grifters out is the subject of some debate. Ideally, as a starting step, the conference would ban absolutely all representatives of fossil fuel companies. But that’s hard to do when some may be part of official national delegations.

Michael Mann and Susan Joy Hassol, writing in the Los Angeles Times, demand an “overhaul of the COP rules and processes. It’s almost embarrassing to have to explicitly state, for example, that petro-states—those whose economies heavily depend on the extraction and export of oil and gas—should not be allowed to host the meeting. Given the enormous conflict of interest, oil industry executives should not be allowed to heavily influence, much less preside over, the summit.”

That is hard to argue with, although, as TNR’s Kate Aronoff recently argued, the United States should probably be considered a petrostate too: It’s the top producer of oil and gas in the world. And while the U.S. economy may be more diversified than that of some petrostates, the sector still accounts for 8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to throw its weight behind any reform that tells states like itself to sit down and shut up. (If Donald Trump wins reelection, that may be a moot point, as he’ll probably withdraw the country from the conferences entirely.)

There are other, more procedural ideas for how to improve these meetings. Former U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Christiana Figueres said earlier this year that while “multilateral engagement” was the point of the original COPs, it’s now “distracting governments from doing their homework at home.” Experts surveyed by Grist’s Tik Root suggested smaller “working groups” or “sectoral agreements”—like one regulating methane—in lieu of big conferences on total emissions targets.

Subash Pandey, writing in The Kathmandu Post, suggested taking the entire group of nonstate actors and giving them their own event at a different time and place—still “under the UNFCCC’s purview”—so that the state negotiators can do their work in relative peace. Although this would kick out a lot of NGOs and activists as well, there might be an added benefit. “Smaller COPs,” Pandey wrote, “would make hosting these events more accessible to smaller and less affluent nations. Consider countries like Nepal, which currently may struggle to organize COPs that attract tens of thousands of participants. Small COPs would provide a unique opportunity to host COPs, showcasing the real and immediate impacts of climate change, particularly in regions like the Himalaya.”

None of these reform ideas are perfect. Kicking out all nonstate actors, for example, would leave a lot of state actors with personal or professional ties to industry, while excluding climate justice advocates and others seeking to amplify more vulnerable voices. But a policy that cuts attendance drastically so that less wealthy nations have a chance of hosting would make voices like Ainu’u’s and Kangujam’s harder to ignore.

Who knows whether, reform or no, it’s possible for the assembled states at these meetings to agree on anything substantive and binding, or for the lumbering and unjust political structure of the U.S. to pass a law enacting it. But at a bare minimum, delegates should probably be forced to confront the consequences of their inaction in the airports they fly into, the streets they traverse on the way to the conference center. They should be deliberating surrounded by reminders of fossil fuels’ destruction, rather than monuments to the immense wealth these fuels have created for a select circle. People condemning their more vulnerable brethren, as well as subsequent generations, to danger, hunger, instability, sickness, exile, or death shouldn’t be “comfy” while they’re doing it. And they shouldn’t be able to dismiss the vulnerable with a round of applause and a revoked badge.

Good News/Bad News

Stat of the Week
1/4

That’s the proportion of the world’s freshwater fish at risk of extinction due to climate change and other human-caused disruptions, according to a new report.

What I’m Reading

Biden Should Abolish Secretive Corporate Tribunals that Bypass the Law

Investor-state dispute settlements, or ISDS, allow corporations to essentially sue a government for “policies that reduce their profits,” Molly Taft writes. These processes take place in private and then the corporations are compensated with taxpayer money. And if governments, including the U.S., are serious about fighting climate change, Taft argues, these settlements should be scrapped:

Giving powerful corporations the ability to leapfrog international judicial systems and keep major rulings secret in pursuit of profits may be a fair trade-off to the Journal’s editorial page. But activists warn that the potential applications of ISDS are especially dire when it comes to the climate crisis. A 2021 analysis by the International Institute of Sustainable Development of more than 1,200 publicly available ISDS cases dating as far back as the 1970s found that the fossil fuel industry used the ISDS process more than any other industry, bringing around 20 percent of all cases, and that the majority of these cases were decided in favor of investors.

Read the rest of Molly Taft’s piece in The Nation.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.