Climate Inaction

By David Wallace-Wells

Climate action does not just take place within nations but between them. Here, too, the hurdles are monumental. We have not yet really begun to consider the ways in which climate change will shape and distort our global politics - bringing carbon budgets into the architecture of trade agreements and peace treaties, reshaping rivalries between nations by literally reshaping their geographies, introducing in the face of drowning nations and uninhabitable cities in the poorest parts of the world the matter of climate reparations and the question of just who will pay.

But the way our present politics is shaping our climate policy is already clear enough.


The Paris climate accords, signed nearly a decade after the Great Recession, seemed to mark the end of the long era of technocratic, neoliberal globalism. And, yet, as a multilateral treaty negotiated on the principle of positive-sum cooperation, it reflects those values in almost every way.

Distressingly, it also reflects the failures of those values. Just two years in, no major industrial nation in the world but India is on track to keep warming below two degrees....

Over the past 25 years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure today's price using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar-energy costs have fallen more than 80%)....

From "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming"