Public opinion has moved, partly because more people now have first-hand experience with the effects of climate change. A poll this month found that a record 76% of Americans think global warming is real; only 12% think it isn’t, writes doylemcmanus.
The sense of impending doom was made official when the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world is almost certain to blow past the target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement of holding the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 19th century level.
That’s tempered by the fact that Americans rank plenty of other issues — beginning with the economy and COVID-19 — as “top priorities.” The good news there is that China, which has long proclaimed its intention to clean up its energy sector some day, is increasingly a global outlier. But while there’s not much optimism in the short term, the long-run goal of slowing and then reversing global warming no longer looks unreachable. The problem can be solved with tools we have: evolving technologies, efficiency and conservation.
Doomism “isn’t helpful when it leads to inaction,” she said. “We’re not just tied to the railway track, where there’s nothing we can do. We’re in the locomotive with our hand on the throttle. We have the ability to take our hand off the throttle and put our foot on the brake.