This morning in Dubai, after a long night of consultations, the world struck a deal that will guide countries’ commitments to fixing climate change. For the first time in the nearly 30 years of the Conference of Parties, a COP document managed to directly address reducing fossil fuels. The text “calls on parties” to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
Like the draft agreement that came out yesterday at COP28, in Dubai—which softened language about phasing out fossil fuels to “reducing” them and “efforts towards” substituting “unabated” fossil fuels—Canada is awkwardly trying to live with two contradictory ideas about climate change. The world has to stop using fossil fuels, and yet, for a petrostate, letting go isn’t easy.
In the climate-change era, everyone who has oil wants to be the last one to sell it. Oil-producing countries still plan to increase production in the near term, and very few economic incentives exist to press them in any other direction. As long as someone else still has oil, they’ll sell it to your customer in your stead. Oil-industry insiders have said this point-blank throughout this year’s United Nations climate talks in Dubai, which are scheduled to end tomorrow.
The size of COP28 is hard to comprehend, even from the ground. More than 97,000 people have registered, according to the massive spreadsheet of expected participants, enough to populate a small city. The campus and its temporary denizens feel like a city too. Meetings are spread out across nearly 100 buildings, all with the freshly built feeling one expects from Dubai.
In a way, the story of American natural gas is a particularly American story, one of entrepreneurial hustle, booms and busts, and a will to find opportunity where nobody’s looked. Of resourceful self-preservation for the sake of self-preservation alone. Of supply needing demand, and of manufacturing that demand through the means at hand, even if the logic is sometimes tough to follow.
On Friday, November 17, 2023, the Earth appeared to have crossed a threshold into new climatic territory. That day was the first that the average air temperature near the surface of the Earth was 2 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels. Saturday was the second.The planet has been this hot before, but never in the era relevant to modern humanity.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarkable efficiency of heat pumps is driving their own uptake now. Sales of electric vehicles could surpass those of gas-burning cars in the next six years.
In the hours before Hurricane Otis made landfall, everything aligned to birth a beast. The hurricane, which arrived near Acapulco, Mexico, early this morning, had an improbable combination of terrible traits. It was small and nimble, as tropical storms go, which reduced the amount of data points available to forecasters and made it harder to track. It came toward land at night, which is the least ideal time for a chaos-inducing event to hit a population center.
The giant chestnut tree, growing in place for hundreds of years, would have been impossible to miss. Its leaves were glossy and dark green, its bark riven like a mountain range seen from above. The fungi it relies on were harder to see.A fungi-hunter is not looking for an object so much as a system, brushing aside a layer of damp leaves to find the gossamer filaments that hold up the world.
Cameron Parish, Louisiana, used to be a nice collection of little coastal towns where the shrimping was good and the stars at night were better, James Hiatt told me. Hiatt lives just up the river, in Lake Charles, but he comes down to Cameron to be near the Gulf. He remembers when there were 1,500 people, a grocery store, and a Family Dollar in Cameron, the parish seat.
Since early this summer, Keith Poulsen, the director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, was worried about mink. Poulsen’s lab is part of a national network of veterinary labs that work on animal diseases, and they had “been watching COVID-19 very carefully,” Poulsen told me. In Europe, mink on fur farms were catching COVID-19. And they seemed to be able to pass it back to people.