At long last, some good news on climate

The past several years — five or six at least — have been a very depressing time to be a climate activist. All through that period, pretty much all the news on climate was bad. 

First came the election of Donald Trump, ensuring that the U.S. government would be taking no action on climate for four years at least. Then we learned that the earth was heating faster than scientists had previously thought, giving us even less time to prevent disaster. Scientists started saying that "baked in" warming from greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere meant we had to not only cut emissions dramatically — something our nation had so far failed to do — but also remove huge amounts of carbon if we wanted to avoid running right over the cliff edge like Wile E. Coyote. Last April, the final IPCC report narrowed the window of opportunity down to a mere eight years, saying if the world's nations couldn't reduce their emissions around 43% by 2030, it would be too late to prevent the climate apocalypse. And just two months ago, Joe Manchin's announcement that he would not support President Biden's climate bill seemed to definitively destroy any possibility of meeting that goal.

And then came the miracle. A mere six weeks later — six weeks of, we now know, constant behind-the-scenes negotiations on the part of Chuck Schumer — Manchin announced that he had changed his mind and would now agree to support a slightly scaled-back version of the climate bill. Over the next two weeks, the newly rebranded "Inflation Reduction Act" gained the support of Krysten Sinema, the only other Democrat who remained on the fence; it got the go-ahead from the Senate Parliamentarian; it squeaked through the Senate with the support of all 50 Democrats and a tie-breaking vote from the Vice President; it made it through the House by a 13-vote margin; and the President is preparing to sign it next week. After literally decades of effort, our country has finally joined the rest of the world in taking action against the most existential threat of our time.

The new bill isn't perfect, of course. Nothing in this world ever is, and that goes double for anything that has to make it through Congress. Analyses from the Rhodium Group, Energy Innovation, and the REPEAT Project all estimate that with this bill, the U.S. will reduce its overall emissions to something like 40% below their 2005 peak by 2030. That's very good, but still shy of the 50% goal set by President Biden...and also not as impressive as it sounds, since we were already on track to cut emissions by around 25% within that time frame even without this bill. But still, it puts that 50% goal within reach. With additional action at the federal and state level, and with the private sector doing its part, hitting that target is now a real possibility.

And there's more good news: cutting emissions may, in fact, be enough to bring global warming to a halt. Climate scientists now believe that, rather than rising inexorably for decades even after emissions drop to zero, global temperatures will in fact stabilize within just a few years after that point. Cutting emissions won't reverse the warming that's already taken place, but it will, repeat will, stop it from getting worse. That means we'll have more time than we thought to deal with the consequences, such as rising sea levels and ocean acidification, and find ways to either counter them or adapt to them.

This doesn't mean we can all just dust off our hands and say, "Our work here is done." It's not done by a long chalk. There's still that extra 10% of emissions we need to cut by the end of this decade, not to mention that we need to keep the momentum going to get emissions to zero by 2050. And ideally, we should be working at the same time on carbon drawdown (new forests, enhanced weathering, soil carbon storage, etc.) to have some hope of bringing temperatures back down to a reasonable level.

In short, there's still a lot of work to be done. What's changed is that there's now reason to hope that the work we do will actually make a difference.