The US is destroying climate progress | It’s time to rethink how climate action succeeds. The key is to acknowledge that it’s never the sole force driving political decisions
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/26/us-climate-progress-strategy-conservatives
4 Comments
From the article: We are witnessing the most devastating climate disasters on record: wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, deadly floods in North Carolina, and global temperature records shattered month after month. We have officially surpassed 1.5C of warming, a critical threshold scientists have long warned against. At the same time, the US is scaling back policies, freezing critical programs and shifting priorities away from climate action.
But now isn’t the time to give up on climate action. Instead, it is high time to rethink how it succeeds.
The reality is that the United States has never had a true, comprehensive climate policy. Unlike other countries that have enacted economy-wide regulations, the US approach has been fragmented, focused on supporting specific technologies rather than tackling climate change holistically. That has especially been true for carbon removal technologies and practices that remove existing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere and an essential tool for meeting global climate goals.
Instead, we have federal direct air capture policy, federal agriculture policy, and federal forestry and oceans policy. Each of these exists within distinct legislative and political frameworks, driven not by national political divides but by state-level economic interests, policy mechanisms like tax credits or R&D funding, and the coalitions that support them.
This distinction is crucial. Over the past few years, bipartisan support has helped unlock billions of dollars for carbon removal. But that does not mean carbon removal itself is bipartisan. Direct air capture has bipartisan support, as do soil carbon programs, reforestation efforts and ocean-based carbon removal. Almost every piece of legislation supporting a pillar of carbon removal has sponsors from both parties, but that is because they align with localized economic and political priorities – not because of broad bipartisan agreement on climate action.
“Climate action” does not, cannot, and will not succeed for a very simple reason: Not enough people want it to. The effort requires substantial buy-in and there’s little sign of that. And as every year passes without significant efforts addressing the climate problem, the need for increasingly extreme actions, such as shutting down industry for periods of time, makes it less likely that any progress will ever be made.
This is a fossil-fuel shill article.
Direct air capture is completely impossible at the scale and in the time period needed to avert the catastrophic consequences from climate change. This is pure overshoot-management propaganda and techo-optimism hopium.
My response is based off of narratives i’ve noticed within media, they are not reflective of my personal opinions before you downvote:
It is human nature for a group of people to refuse change if they are the only ones (as they perceive it) making that substantial change. I say this in context to BRIC nations not adhering to the same policies as western society. India being the outlier.
Narratives in the US will continually push that China etc do not impose the same ‘self-sanctions’ as western countries do and so they will be reluctant to. Even more so under the current administration.
The sad reality is that countries value their own development and prosperity over the benefits of others even if it leads to their demise in the long run, particularly for something which can so easily be contested by negative agents as climate change.
Without a unilateral action and regulation for all countries, BRICs & G7/NATO, there will never be meaningful progress as the discussion point has been politicized by all to an extent where people believe it to be a leverage for winning votes rather than an actual necessity.