There has, rather ironically, been a bit of a cooling off towards climate change happening in the middle of this decade we’re in. In Western Culture, anyways. It’s a very different story out East. Climate change, which was super hot in several senses in the early 2020s, is now changing into something unpopular, unimportant, and out of vogue. And while I am a former Climate Change Specialist and I care very deeply about climate change, maybe a bit of a retreat from the subject, for the moment, isn’t such a terrible thing. Maybe it is good to be out of the headlines for a bit (sort of, I’ll come back to that).
Climate change, if you haven’t been following along, has had a truly remarkable winning streak these last few years in terms of engagement and response across from the world. The celebrated Inflation Reduction Act was but one of several pieces of legislation and funding that put humanity on a course to potentially beat climate change. Not to prevent it, it’s too late for that, but to stave off the worst effects and put is on track for a cleaner future without greenhouse gas emissions. The EU has been doing remarkable work. Climate laggards like Canada and Australia were even starting to take action. Electric cars! Carbon pricing! Bills signed into law that called for net-zero emissions by 2050! Quite simply, we were winning.
Seriously, the progress we’ve seen in the last five years is genuinely incredible. 92.5% of all new electric generation is renewable. Or, at least, non-emitting. Enbridge Gas, of all people, are building colossal solar arrays. Electric cars are making leaps and bounds in most of the world. Heat Pumps, less sexy than cars but still important, are flying off the shelves. Adaptation strategies are underway. For a moment there, it looked like we were going to beat climate change.
Now things look quite bleak, looking at the political side of things. And what I think has happened, in the big picture, is that when victory looked possible, a lot of people tuned out. I think a very real problem people have is that it is easy to mistake progress for victory. People see very real progress, some change, and their attention wanders elsewhere to a newer, more urgent, more awful problem. This is understandable, there’s no shortage of crises and problems to fixate on. The cost of living, housing, migration, slides into autocracy, whatever else alarmed people. And with climate change, it looked like the crisis was averted for a moment there (it still can be), and several years of consistently and moderately successful work turned out to be a bit of a poisoned pill.
Governments wave swept into power who are dismantling climate action and policy (Hi Mark Carney, I wasn’t just talking about Trump). And now, we’re seeing some of this progress reversed. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the most obvious and egregious example, is a huge step backward on climate policy, but it has been far from the only major relapse. Overall, things are stalling. Stalling is not good, especially when facing a problem with very real time constraints.
However. I’d like to remind everyone what while America is extremely loud, and Canada parrots what America says to some extent, North America it is not representative of the human race, as much as Americans would like to think it is so. On the other side of the world, namely but not exclusively in China, the rush to decarbonization has never been at a greater frenzy. Seriously, what’s going on in China right now, if you’ve not heard, is truly a marvel. That is a whole other essay entirely, but in short, I’d like to think the West is in a tactical retreat while the East proves it is more than possible to make an absolute mountain of money decarbonizing.
So here’s hoping the backsliding on climate change is temporary, strategic, and short-lived. I’m still quite optimistic about what can be done about climate change in the long-term, but I suspect we’re in for a few lean years on any real progress in the Western World. Good thing the world is much larger than that, though.
Alex Colvin 