H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Our political system is dominated by corporate money in general and fossil-fuel money in particular.

“The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological catastrophe, we need to level down” is

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,” Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. “Hope is the dream of a waking man.” Go looking for hopeful climate stories and they turn up everywhere.

Study after study has concluded that cutting emissions creates jobs. Recently, a Princeton-based team issued a report detailing how the United States could reduce its net emissions to zero by 2050. The researchers considered several possible decarbonization “pathways.” The one labelled “high electrification” would, they projected, eliminate sixty-two thousand jobs in the coal industry and four hundred thousand in the natural-gas sector. But it was expected to produce nearly eight hundred thousand jobs in construction, more than seven hundred thousand in the solar industry, and more than a million in upgrading the grid.

This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentineans, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred.

These figures rarely feature in conversations about climate change in the U.S.; they were hardly mentioned, for instance, in the debate over the Inflation Reduction Act. But to the world’s low-consuming countries, the inequities are impossible to ignore. They represent yet another way the Global North has exploited the Global South; call it atmospheric imperialism.