This article is part of our special section on the Climate Forward event that will include policy and climate leaders from around the world.
On any given day, there is good reason to be both exceedingly optimistic about the progress being made to combat climate change, and also deeply concerned about the threats presented by a rapidly warming planet.
Take a single Wednesday last month: Aug. 16. On that day, the White House celebrated the first anniversary of the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. President Biden’s signature climate legislation is providing hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the build-out of clean energy around the country, turbocharging efforts to shift the economy away from planet-warming fossil fuels.
At the very same time, however, a flurry of extreme weather events were battering the globe. Hurricane Hilary, which would go on to lash Southern California as a rare tropical storm, formed in the Pacific Ocean. Portland and other cities in the Northwest United States were sizzling under an unusual heat wave. And Japan was cleaning up from a destructive typhoon.
It was a dizzying combination of good news and epic disasters that captured the disorienting moment in which we find ourselves.
On the one hand, a new green revolution is genuinely underway, with trillions of dollars being spent to reduce planet-warming emissions. On the other hand, the destructive effects of climate change are now squarely upon us, and poised to get worse, scientists predict.
“The basis for both the hope and the fear has increased,” Al Gore, the former vice president, said in an interview. “That may sound like a paradox, but I’ve never been more hopeful that we are going to solve this crisis, and there’s never been clearer evidence of how rapidly this crisis is getting much worse, faster than expected.”
It’s this tension — between progress and inertia, between a sustainable future and an untenable status quo — that will animate a full day of live journalism at The New York Times Climate Forward event on Thursday.
Timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly session in New York City, the event will feature conversations with Mr. Gore; Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store of Norway; President William Ruto of Kenya; Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft and the founder of Breakthrough Energy; the tidying-up expert and author Marie Kondo; the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy; and many other climate leaders.
Together, they will be taking stock of a crisis that is reshaping our planet, transforming economies, straining our food system and challenging humans to adapt to a warmer world. In the past few months alone, record heat, unusually warm oceans, and disappearing sea ice have shattered records and alarmed the scientific community, while unprecedented wildfires, floods and storms have wreaked havoc around the globe.
“We have 100-year floods occurring every five years, fires sweeping across the country, and respiratory illnesses are on the rise,” said Ebony Twilley Martin, executive director of Greenpeace USA. “It’s no wonder that two-thirds of Americans want action on climate change.”
But while there are indeed growing calls for action on climate, according to the Pew Research Center, remaking the world’s energy, transportation, agricultural and industrial systems is no small task.
In Europe and the United States, a growing percentage of electricity is being generated with wind turbines and solar power, and more electric vehicles are taking to the road. Yet across much of the rest of the world, new coal plants are still being built, and a growing middle class is consuming more plastics, fuels and meat.
So-called climate deniers — some industry leaders, influential politicians and members of the general public — are skeptical of the science and often equally opposed to the proposed solutions, and some fossil fuel companies continue to block efforts to reduce emissions.
And while world leaders pledged to try and keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels at the United Nations climate summit in Paris in 2015, that goal looks unachievable today.
Against this backdrop, calls to phase out the use of coal, gas and oil are growing more urgent than ever before.
“With a growing global population, energy demands are only going up, and fossil fuels are absolutely not the answer to this increased demand,” said Ms. McCarthy, the former E.P.A. administrator. “We need to install more wind, solar and other existing clean energy solutions that are now cheaper and healthier than fossil fuels.”
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, has grown impassioned in his calls to phase out fossil fuels and draw down greenhouse gas emissions. “The era of global warming has ended,” he said recently. “The era of global boiling has arrived.”
Activists are disrupting sporting events, shutting down highways and taking to the streets. And young people are increasingly engaged, bringing lawsuits and challenging politicians and corporate interests.
“It definitely is a David versus Goliath fight,” Nalleli Cobo, a young activist from Los Angeles who grew up near an active oil well and developed cancer at age 19, said during the March to End Fossil Fuels in New York. “But as a person of faith, I’m very happy to be David in this fight. It’s a reminder of the collective power that we have.”
And business leaders and philanthropists are increasingly engaged. Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, has made climate action a core part of his charitable strategy and is spending more than $1 billion on efforts to shut down coal, gas and petrochemical plants.
It will take trillions of dollars, not just billions, however, to build out clean energy infrastructure around the world, while at the same time adapting to a hotter planet.
There is tentative hope that proposed reforms to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund could help unlock some of that capital, sending it to developing countries — especially in Africa, which has 60 percent of the world’s solar energy potential and almost a third of the minerals that will be needed to electrify transportation and the power grid.
“If you think about the attributes and the assets that we’re going to need in order to survive and thrive this century, Africa is uniquely well endowed,” said James Irungu Mwangi, a Kenyan entrepreneur who helped organize the recent Africa Climate Summit. “Investing in Africa and climate positive growth is one of the best chances the world has of getting anywhere close to the Paris goals.”
But more than money, what is needed, climate advocates say, is a wholesale reimagining of the world and our place in it.
“The single biggest obstacle to having a meaningful effect on climate change is the narrative that nature and humanity are disconnected or separate,” said the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and chief executive of the Hip-Hop Caucus, an advocacy group working to stop the expansion of fossil fuels.
Mr. Yearwood said that as climate disasters multiply, there is a growing need for people across the world to recognize that this is the only planet we have. “We must begin to center the human impact of climate change,” he said, “and understand how it intersects with all aspects of our daily lives.”
Only then, he said, will we have a chance of solving what may be the greatest collective action problem in human history.
