A Low Point of Human Inaction on Climate Change
Events now move at a pace so exhausting that it’s hard to remember that 2025 began with an epic climate-fuelled disaster: large portions of the nation’s second-biggest city, Los Angeles, burned in a firestorm that lasted days, after a record-dry autumn. A succession of such tragedies followed—for instance, the killer floods along the Guadalupe River, in Texas, where atmospheric moisture off an overheated Gulf of Mexico had hit record levels. Or Hurricane Melissa, where wind gusts reached two hundred and fifty-two miles per hour, faster than ever measured in a tropical cyclone at sea, thanks to the superheated waters of the Caribbean. The same day that Melissa hit Jamaica, a storm dropped five feet of rain on central Vietnam in twenty-four hours, the second-biggest deluge in recorded history, and the start of a truly sodden autumn across Southeast Asia which has left more than a thousand people dead.
The year 2025 seems nearly certain to enter the books tied with 2023 as the second-hottest ever measured, trailing only 2024. Since both of those earlier years were influenced by a strong El Niño event, this one will have the dubious distinction of being the hottest without such an extraneous force. This is apparently what business as usual looks like for a planetary climate carrying our atmosphere’s current load of carbon dioxide and methane. On the three-year moving average by which we measure such things, the Earth is now inching ever-closer to the 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in temperature set out as a goal to avoid just a decade ago at the Paris climate talks. And diplomatic events in 2025 did little to ease fears about what’s coming. The thirtieth Conference of the Parties (COP) global climate talks in Belem, Brazil—which no one from the Trump Administration attended—just concluded, and the Times described the final document in unusually straightforward terms as “a victory for oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia.”
None of this should shock anyone. International climate diplomacy, since its high-water mark at Paris, in 2015, has been besieged by the fossil-fuel industry and its proxy governments, which now include, of course, the United States, historically the Earth’s chief producer of CO2. I’m going to quote at some length from the speech the American President delivered to a silent U.N. General Assembly in September, because it sums up perfectly both his own imperviousness to fact and the assertiveness of the oil-and-gas world after his Inauguration this year.
Describing, for instance, his understanding of climate science (invented arguably in its modern form in the United States, whose scientists first tracked the gases accumulating in the atmosphere and then built the computer models allowing us to predict our fate), Donald Trump said, “It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties, they said, Global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said, Global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” Then, with regard to modern environmentalism, one of America’s greatest contributions to the world—a consciousness that allowed our air and water to be cleaned up dramatically over recent decades—Trump said, “In the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable.”