After COP30, what now?

Image by Sujalparab via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

 From East Anglia Bylines

Author Kurt Vonnegut described this as one of his shapes of story. Of Cinderella, the most popular story ever and translated into 700 languages, he said: “People love that story.”

It’s Rags to Riches. We all recognise this shape of story in our own hopes.

Now we’re all in a climate and nature hole.

The physics of heat are relentless. Rising seas, more moisture in the air, droughts then heavier rain, stronger wind and storm, melting glaciers. The cause is simple. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases capturing heat in the atmosphere. The source is clear too. It’s fossil fuels. Coal, oil, gas.

This much is known. The hole is hot and the future dark.

So it seems.

The 30^th COP (United Nations Conference of the Parties) has just concluded in the Amazonian city of Belém. COPs are good. They bring people together. They bring along activists and thinkers and academics and citizens’ groups. People meet, talk, share. Little advances happen.

But there are two problems

Groups of countries can easily be blockers. Key text disappears from the declaration as everyone tries to get to at least some kind of agreement. In the COP30 agreement, there’s no mention of fossil fuels. Blockers won.

Second, even when a declaration emerges at a time of common purpose and gentle politics, such as in Paris 2015, it still needs to be implemented.

We all hoped the Paris agreement would hold global temperatures to below +1.5°C (above pre-industrial baseline). But in ten years, carbon dioxide levels have leapt, and temperatures followed. The breaching of +1.5°C is inevitable.

And yet, COPs are wondrous

There’s common purpose. They point at the deniers and the selfish. They provide an energy to social and political change. They’re talked about.

For we have much to share. Remarkably, things are happening with renewables. They are reaching a scale where costs are falling and businesses, households and whole communities start to look daft in not adopting.

A quiz question. What links these seven countries: Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Uruguay?

It is this: their electricity supply systems are 100% renewable. A mix of wind, solar, hydro and geothermal has saved them huge sums of money by not having to purchase fossil fuels. These countries did this not by accident, but by intent. Governments chose.

Another question. When you spend capital on renewable energy infrastructure, what are the running costs of producing energy?

This is easy. It’s virtually zero. You get electricity for nothing, for 25, 30, 35 years. And there are no clean up costs. No air pollution to damage health. No greenhouse gases.

Countries are saving money; so are households

Typically, adoption follows an S-curve. For a long period, slow growth, then the exponential steep part, then a flattening. But after 80% of adoption, you don’t need to worry about the last bit. We know that systems then tip.

Life on the S-curve is something staggering, as Bill McKibben writes in his new book, “Here Comes the Sun.”

In 2004, it took the world one year to install 1GW (gigawatt) of solar generation. In 2016, it took one week; in 2023 one day; in 2024 just 18 hours.

This is happening fast.

Here’s the example of electric vehicles (EVs), as Tim Lenton shows in “Positive Tipping Points.”

In 2010, there were 3,000 EVs in the whole world. By 2022, there were 10 million; in 2024, 40 million. Doubling times for adoption are one and a half years. In four more doubling periods, a total of six years, there will be 640 million EVs worldwide. One more doubling period, and all fossil fuel vehicles will be gone. They’ll be stranded assets, along with ships burning oil to move oil, and petrol stations and domestic tankers.

In China, EV car companies are now offering 600,000-mile warranties, so confident are they in the technology. It’s going to take a lot of years for most people to drive that far.

A small change in policy can help

All countries across Europe are suffering higher gas prices since the invasion of Ukraine. Germany has just deregulated the installation of solar PV on balconies and roofs of flats. 1.5 million people have acted. Solar panels are suddenly everywhere. Their energy costs have fallen. The country is safer too. Now the same in Italy, Poland and Spain.

Solar panels are, after all, now cheaper than garden fences.

In Pakistan, national electricity demand fell by 10% last year. Households, farmers, businesses are buying cheap solar panels from China, installing them on every roof and spare patch of land. In six months last year, people installed 30% of national grid power. Diesel sales fell across the country by 30%.

The UK is good-bad

The first country to have a legally binding Climate Change Act. The first country deliberately to remove coal from all electricity generation: the last plant closed in late 2024. Yet oddly hesitating over renewables.

Let’s put this in perspective. Sizewell is the UK’s next nuclear power station. It’s going to take a long time to build; it’ll be late (they all are); we’ll pay more (we always do). And at the end, it’ll produce a meagre 3GW per year.

Don’t laugh. This is true. In Wyoming this year, legislators filed a Bill entitled “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again.”

Yet in the Dakotas, 85% of electricity is now from renewable sources. Tiny Vermont is saving $2 billion per year by not paying to import fossil fuels into the state. Some get it, some don’t.

So what’s our story now?

We’re still in a hole.

Anyone born before 1990 has lived through the good times, and then the fast slide into the hole. 1990 was the last safe year, when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at 350 ppm (parts per million). Today it’s 427, and rising. Very unsafe.

Anyone born after 2010 has only seen the bottom of the hole. They’re going to be the first generation to experience the single direction of upward movement. It’s going to feel very good indeed.

COPs are important. They stop forgetfulness.

COPS are flawed. Agreements are hard, and blockers love to do their thing.

Here we are then. In a decade when systems will flip, costs and pollution fall. When countries will find that green growth brings new jobs, better health and lower energy costs.

As Nick Stern recently wrote, “When some step back, others step forward.” The arc of history is being revealed.

We do still have choices.

Like Greta Thunberg, I think the COP process is now useless, so I disagree with the conclusions of this article.  All the same, there is lots of good news in it, so I posted it.

Two optimistic trends

 It's easy enough to be deeply pessimistic about climate change.  Emissions continue to rise, and while these days one only occasionally encounters unhinged denialists, the acceptance that something needs to be done hasn't yet translated into effective action.  There is lots of "committed to" but little real action.  (Buying scammy carbon offsets isn't real action.  Real action is actually cutting emissions.)  Lots of blah-blah-blah, as Thunberg says. 

But there are two trends which really are signs that things are shifting.

The first is that over the last 14 years, solar has risen from 1% of new generation capacity installed to 51%, wind from 10% to 25%.  Over the same period, coal fell from 46% to 4%.  And this is the gross addition to the stock of coal-powered generation, that is, it does not include shuttering old coal power stations.  The long-term trend lines in the graphic are obvious, with solar moving from an insignificant sliver to dominance, and fossil fuels falling from 2/3rds to 1/7th.

What this means is that emissions from electricity generation, which contributes 30% of CO2 emissions globally, have prolly peaked.  To avoid a rise of 1.5 degrees, electricity emissions would have to fall by 10% a year over the next 10 years, and that isn't going to happen.  Nevertheless, if it happens over the next 20 years (highly plausible), this alone will cut total emissions by ±1.8% per annum.  

The second trend is the exponential growth in EV sales.  Land transport (which however includes diesel-powered freight transport on road and by rail) contributes another ±20% to CO2 emissions.  EV sales are growing by 60% per annum.  That means they could rise 6.5 times between now and 2026, taking them close to 100% of total car and light truck sales.   If car and light trucks last 15 years, that means that from 2026 onwards, emissions from this sector will be falling by 6% a year.

What's more, the car and light truck fleet will help stabilise the grid, either passively, by charging only when grid supply is high, or actively, by contributing some power back to the grid when there's a shortage.

The surge in the price of lithium is a threat, but two new battery technologies are already making their way out of laboratories into factories:  sodium-ion and aluminium-ion.  Battery costs will resume their decline.

N.B. Log scale!

If the transition to a nearly 100% renewable grid and a 100% electric land transport fleet takes 20 years, emissions will fall by 3.5% a year.  And that is almost acceptable.  It's certainly far better than it's been.  We'll miss the target of limiting the global increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees, but assuming temperatures continue to rise by 0.2 degrees per decade, but halving as emissions halve, we'll avoid 2 degrees.  

Greenwashed out of our senses

Illustration: Nicolás Ortega/The Guardian

A splendid piece from Greta Thunberg, in The Guardian.

Maybe it is the name that is the problem. Climate change. It doesn’t sound that bad. The word “change” resonates quite pleasantly in our restless world. No matter how fortunate we are, there is always room for the appealing possibility of improvement. Then there is the “climate” part. Again, it does not sound so bad. If you live in many of the high-emitting nations of the global north, the idea of a “changing climate” could well be interpreted as the very opposite of scary and dangerous. A changing world. A warming planet. What’s not to like?

Perhaps that is partly why so many people still think of climate change as a slow, linear and even rather harmless process. But the climate is not just changing. It is destabilising. It is breaking down. The delicately balanced natural patterns and cycles that are a vital part of the systems that sustain life on Earth are being disrupted, and the consequences could be catastrophic. Because there are negative tipping points, points of no return. And we do not know exactly when we might cross them. What we do know, however, is that they are getting awfully close, even the really big ones. Transformation often starts slowly, but then it begins to accelerate.

The German oceanographer and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf writes: “We have enough ice on Earth to raise sea levels by 65 metres – about the height of a 20-storey building – and, at the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose by 120 metres as a result of about 5C of warming.” Taken together, these figures give us a perspective on the powers we are dealing with. Sea-level rise will not remain a question of centimetres for very long.

The Greenland ice sheet is melting, as are the “doomsday glaciers” of west Antarctica. Recent reports have stated that the tipping points for these two events have already been passed. Other reports say they are imminent. That means we might already have inflicted so much built-in warming that the melting process can no longer be stopped, or that we are very close to that point. Either way, we must do everything in our power to stop the process because, once that invisible line has been crossed, there might be no going back. We can slow it down, but once the snowball has been set in motion it will just keep going.

“This is the new normal” is a phrase we often hear when the rapid changes in our daily weather patterns – wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and so on – are being discussed. These weather events aren’t just increasing in frequency, they are becoming more and more extreme. The weather seems to be on steroids, and natural disasters increasingly appear less and less natural. But this is not the “new normal”. What we are seeing now is only the very beginning of a changing climate, caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. Until now, Earth’s natural systems have been acting as a shock absorber, smoothing out the dramatic transformations that are taking place. But the planetary resilience that has been so vital to us will not last for ever, and the evidence seems to suggest more and more clearly that we are entering a new era of more dramatic change.

Climate change has become a crisis sooner than expected. So many of the researchers I’ve spoken to have said that they were shocked to witness how quickly it is escalating. But since science is very cautious when it comes to making predictions, maybe this should not come as a big surprise. One result of this, however, is that very few people actually knew how to react when the signs started becoming obvious in recent years. And fewer still had planned how to communicate what is happening. It seems like the vast majority of people were preparing for a different, less urgent scenario. A crisis that would take place many decades into the future. And yet here we are. The climate and ecological crisis is not happening in some faraway future. It’s happening right here and right now.


If everyone lived like we do in Sweden, we would need the resources of 4.2 planet Earths to sustain us. And the climate targets set in the Paris agreement would be but a very distant memory – a threshold that we would have crossed many, many years ago. The fact that 3 billion people use less energy, on an annual per capita basis, than a standard American refrigerator gives you an idea of how far away from global equity and climate justice we currently are.

The climate crisis is not something that “we” have created. The worldview that largely dominates the perspective from Stockholm, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, Sydney or Auckland is not so prevalent in Mumbai, Ngerulmud, Manila, Nairobi, Lagos, Lima or Santiago. People from the parts of the world that are most responsible for this crisis must realise that other perspectives do exist and that they have to start listening to them. Because when it comes to the climate and ecological crisis – just like most other issues – many people living in rich economies still act as if they rule the world. By using up the remains of our carbon budgets – the maximum amount of CO2 we can collectively emit to give the world a 67% chance of staying below 1.5C of global temperature rise – the global north is stealing the future as well as the present. It is stealing not only from its own children but, above all, from those who live in the most affected parts of the world, many of whom are yet to build much of the most basic modern infrastructure that others take for granted. And still this deeply immoral theft does not even exist in the discourse of the so-called developed world.

Saving the world is voluntary. You could certainly argue against that statement from a moral point of view, but the fact remains: there are no laws or restrictions in place that will force anyone to take the necessary steps towards safeguarding our future living conditions on planet Earth. This is troublesome from many perspectives, not least because – as much as I hate to admit it – Beyoncé was wrong. It is not girls who run the world. It is run by politicians, corporations and financial interests – mainly represented by white, privileged, middle-aged, straight cis men. And it turns out most of them are terribly ill suited for the job. This may not come as a big surprise. After all, the purpose of a company is not to save the world – it is to make a profit. Or, rather, it is to make as much profit as it possibly can in order to keep shareholders and market interests happy.

This leaves us with our political leaders. They do have great opportunities to improve things, but it turns out that saving the world is not their main priority, either.

Approaching the issues of the climate and ecological crisis inevitably involves confronting numerous uncomfortable questions. Taking on the role of being the one who tells the unpleasant truth, and thereby risking one’s popularity, is clearly not on any politician’s wishlist. So they try to stay clear of the subject until they absolutely cannot avoid it any longer – then they turn to communication tactics and PR to make it seem as if real action is being taken, when in fact the exact opposite is happening.

It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to keep calling out the bullshit of our so-called leaders. I want to believe that people are good. But there really seems to be no end to these cynical games. If your objective as a politician truly is to act on the climate crisis, then surely your first step would be to gather accurate figures for our actual emissions to get a complete overview of the problem, and from there start looking at real solutions? That would also give you a rough idea of the changes needed, the scale of them and how quickly they need to be put in place. This, however, has not been done – or even suggested – by any world leader. Or, to my knowledge, by any one single politician.

Journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto describes how she started investigating Swedish climate policies and found that only a third of our actual emissions of greenhouse gases were included in our climate targets and the official national statistics. The rest were either outsourced or hidden in the loopholes of international climate accounting frameworks. So whenever the climate crisis is debated in my “progressive” home country, we conveniently leave out two-thirds of the problem. An investigation by the Washington Post in November 2021 has shown that this phenomenon is far from unique to Sweden. Though the figures vary from case to case, this process and the overall mentality of constantly trying to sweep things under the carpet and blame others is the international norm.

So when our politicians say that we must solve the climate crisis, we should all ask them which climate crisis they are referring to. Is it the crisis that contains all our emissions or the one that contains only a part of them? When politicians go a step further and accuse the climate movement of not offering any solutions to our problems, we should ask them what problems they are talking about. Is it the problem that is caused by all our emissions or just by the ones they didn’t manage to outsource or hide in the statistics? Because these are completely different issues.

It will take many things for us to start facing this emergency – but, above all, it will take honesty, integrity and courage. The longer we wait to start taking the action needed to stay in line with our international targets, the harder and more costly it will get to reach them. The inaction of today and yesterday must be compensated for in the time that lies ahead.

For us to have even a small chance of avoiding setting off irreversible chain reactions far beyond human control, we need drastic, immediate, far-reaching emission cuts at the source. When your bathtub is about to overflow, you don’t go looking for buckets or start covering the floor with towels – you start by turning off the tap, as soon as you possibly can. Leaving the water running means ignoring or denying the problem, delaying doing anything to resolve it and downplaying its consequences.

Our politicians do not need to wait for anyone else in order to start taking action. Nor do they need conferences, treaties, international agreements or outside pressure. They could start right away. They also have – and have had for a long time – endless opportunities to speak up and send a clear message about the fact that we must fundamentally change our societies. And yet, with very few exceptions, they actively choose not to. This is a moral decision that will not only cost them dearly in the future, it will put the entire living planet at risk.

According to the United Nations’ emissions gap report, the world’s planned fossil fuel production by the year 2030 will be more than twice the amount that would be consistent with keeping to the 1.5c target. This is science’s way of telling us that we can no longer reach our targets without a system change, because meeting our targets would literally require tearing up contracts, valid deals and agreements on an unimaginable scale. This should, of course, be dominating every hour of our everyday news feed, every political discussion, every business meeting and every inch of our daily lives. But that is not what is happening.

The media and our political leaders have the opportunity to take drastic and immediate action, and still they choose not to. Perhaps it is because they are still in denial. Maybe it is because they do not care. Maybe it is because they are unaware. Maybe it is because they are more scared of the solutions than of the problem itself. Maybe it is because they are afraid of causing social unrest. Maybe they are afraid of losing their popularity. Maybe they simply did not go into politics or journalism to uproot a system they believe in – a system they have spent their lives defending. Or maybe the reason for their inaction is a mixture of all these things.

We cannot live sustainably within today’s economic system. Yet that is what we are constantly being told we can do. We can buy sustainable cars, travel on sustainable motorways, powered by sustainable petroleum. We can eat sustainable meat and drink sustainable soft drinks out of sustainable plastic bottles. We can buy sustainable fast fashion and fly on sustainable aeroplanes using sustainable fuels. And, of course, we are going to meet our short- and long-term sustainable climate targets, too, without making the slightest effort.

“How?” you might ask. How can that be possible when we don’t yet have any technical solutions that can fix this crisis alone, and the option of stopping doing things is unacceptable from our current economic standpoint? What are we going to do? Well, the answer is the same as always: we will cheat. We will use all those loopholes and all the creative accounting that we have conjured up in our climate frameworks since the very first conference of the parties, the 1995 Cop1 in Berlin. We will outsource our emissions along with our factories, we will use baseline manipulation and start counting our emission reductions when it suits us best. We will burn trees, forests and biomass, as those have been excluded from the official statistics. We will lock decades of emissions into fossil gas infrastructure and call it green natural gas. And then we will offset the rest with vague afforestation projects – trees that might be lost to disease or fire – while we simultaneously cut down the last of our old-growth forests at a much higher speed.

Don’t get me wrong. Planting the right trees in the right soil is a great thing to do. It eventually sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and we should do it wherever it is suitable for the soil and suitable for the people living there who care for that land. But afforestation should not be confused with offsetting or climate compensation, because that is something completely different. You see, the main problem is that we already have at least 40 years of carbon dioxide emissions to “compensate” for. It is all up there, in the atmosphere, and that is where it will stay, probably for many centuries to come. This historic CO2 is what we should be focusing on when we are using our present – very limited – ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, in various projects such as planting trees. But offsetting, as we have conceived it, is not meant to do that. It was never created for us to clean up our mess. Far too often it has been used as an excuse for us to continue emitting CO2, maintain business as usual and meanwhile send a signal that we have a solution and therefore we do not have to change.

Words matter, and they are being used against us. These are lies. Dangerous lies that will cause further, disastrous delay. Predictions by the UN conclude that our CO2 emissions are expected to rise by another 16% by 2030. The time we have left to avoid creating increasing climate catastrophes in many places around the world is rapidly running out.

We are currently on track to have a world that is 3.2C hotter by the end of the century – and that’s if countries fulfil all the policies they have in place, policies that are often based on flawed and under-reported numbers. But in many cases they are nowhere near doing even that. We are “seemingly light years away from reaching our climate action targets”, to quote UN secretary general António Guterres in the autumn of 2021. And there is also the matter of our previous track record of failure when it comes to delivering on all those non-binding pledges and promises. Let’s just say it is not so impressive or convincing.

Even if we carried out all of our climate action plans, we’d still be in trouble. Net zero by 2050 is simply too little, too late. There is just too much at stake for us to place our destiny in the hands of undeveloped technologies. We need real zero. And we need honesty. At the very least, we need our leaders to start including all our actual emissions in our targets, statistics and policies. Before they do that, any mention of vague, future goals is nothing but a distracting waste of time. They say that we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But what exactly do we do when the “good” not only fails to keep us safe but is also so far away from what is needed that it can only be described as comedy material. Very dark comedy, but still.

They say we must be able to compromise. As if the Paris agreement were not already the world’s biggest compromise. A compromise that has already locked in unimaginable amounts of suffering for the most affected people and areas. I say: “No more.” I say: “Stand your ground.” Our so-called leaders still think they can bargain with physics and negotiate with the laws of nature. They speak to flowers and forests in the language of US dollars and short-term economics. They hold up their quarterly income reports to impress the wild animals. They read stock-market analysis to the waves of the ocean, like fools.

We are approaching a precipice. And I would strongly suggest that those of us who have not yet been greenwashed out of our senses stand our ground. Do not let them drag us another inch closer to the edge. Not one inch. Right here, right now, is where we draw the line.

This is an edited extract from The Climate Book created by Greta Thunberg and published on 27 October by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, buy your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Greta's glare

A cartoon by Pat Bagley


“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

Greta Thunberg: Time's person of the year

People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

I want people to unite behind the science... And that is what we have to realize, that that is what we have to do right now.. I’m not the one who’s saying these things. I’m not the one who we should be listening to. And I say that all the time. I say we need to listen to the scientists.

We are facing an existential crisis... it will have a massive impact on our lives in the future, but also now, especially in vulnerable communities. And I think that we should wake up, and we should also try to wake the adults up, because they are the ones who — their generation is the ones who are mostly responsible for this crisis, and we need to hold them accountable.

----Greta Thunberg

Hat tip to Wayne.

Now we suffer the consequences

From The New York Times via ClimateCrocks

In Northern California, power was cut to more than a million people this week. Near Houston, houses that flooded only two years ago just succumbed again. The South endured record-shattering fall heat waves. In Miami, salt water bubbled through street drains yet again as the rising ocean mounted a fresh assault.

All of it was predicted, in general outline, decades ago. We did not listen. Ideologues and paid shills cajoled us to ignore the warnings. Politicians cashed their checks from the fossil fuel lobbyists and slithered away.

Today, we act surprised as the climate emergency descends upon us in all its ferocity.

The scientists knew long ago, and told us, that the sea would invade the coasts. They knew a hotter atmosphere would send heavier rains to inundate our cities and farms. They knew the landscape of California, which always becomes desiccated in the late summer and early fall, would dry out more in a hotter climate.

But even the scientists did not quite foresee the way that bone-dry vegetation would turn into a firebomb waiting for a spark. California is the state that has done the most to battle the climate crisis, but that has not saved it from recent fires so ferocious they burned people alive.

In high winds, ill-maintained power lines strung across aging poles are often the source of the spark. The largest utility in the state, Pacific Gas & Electric, has already been propelled into bankruptcy by fire liabilities it calculates at $30 billion. Now PG&E, far behind in basic tasks meant to make its system safer, is pre-emptively shutting down power lines on windy days to try to prevent more death and destruction.

If there is any fix for the fire situation, it will not be cheap or easy. True, the people who were running the power company deserve some blame — but not all of it. We now know that power rates in California, high as they may have seemed, were a false economy. The public was not paying enough to harden the electric grid against rising climate risks.

Nationwide, you can say the same about the fossil fuels we burned so heedlessly these last decades. They seemed cheap and convenient at the time. Only now are we learning the true cost.

As tempting as it is to blame the politicians and the fossil fuel executives for the fix we find ourselves in, that is too easy. At any time in these last three decades, we could have woken up. We could have heeded the warnings of scientists like James E. Hansen of NASA, who told Congress in 1988 that the planet was warming sharply and would continue to do so if we persisted in burning fossil fuels. We could have voted James Inhofe, the climate-denying senator from Oklahoma, out of office. Had we been aroused and angry, we could have wielded our democratic power to bring the fossil fuel companies to heel.

I remember sitting with Dr. Hansen in his NASA office the week he retired, in 2013, wondering along with him when the public revolt over the climate crisis would finally begin.

Now we have our answer. Under the unlikely leadership of a brave 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, we are marching in the streets now by the millions. We are making demands. We are angry, and should be, but let’s spare a moment to be angry at ourselves for waiting so long.

People keep asking: Is it too late?

Yes, in some sense it is. What the events in California and Miami and Houston tell us is that we are living through the risks of an altered climate now, not a hundred years from now. Expect the situation to keep getting worse for the rest of your life. The ocean will keep rising for centuries, probably much faster than today. We will lose our great coastal cities.

But here is the thing people must understand: The crisis is still manageable, barely. If we do not move far more aggressively, it could spiral entirely out of control. At a global scale, we have yet to turn the corner and start cutting emissions. If we let them keep rising, today’s wildfires and floods will seem like child’s play soon enough. In a world of ever-rising temperatures, mass starvation is but one of the risks.

The most urgent imperative now is to turn our fear and frustration into votes.

The climate troglodytes must be thrown out of office, starting with Donald J. Trump. We need laws with teeth to propel the clean energy transition: hard targets, bans, taxes, mandates. We cannot stand back for another presidential election in which the Republican Party lies about this issue while the Democratic Party hides from it.

Granted, “Curtail future damage!” is not an inspiring battle cry. “To the Bastille!” it is not. Yet millions of young people have begun to understand the stakes, their fears given voice by that young lady from Sweden, with her moral intelligence and her capacity to wield the truth like a rapier.

Look again at that picture of her, a lone student picketing Sweden’s Parliament with a homemade sign, and let yourself marvel at the birth of a global movement. Older people forced the youth into this situation by our dereliction, and now we must not let them carry the battle alone.

Greta Thunberg outside Swedish Parliament