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Ideas

An American flag in deep water.
Ideas

The Real Problem With ‘Climate Realism’

What the Council on Foreign Relations’ new climate program gets drastically wrong.

Ideas

For Real Energy Dominance, We Need the IRA

Biden’s Secretary of Energy argues that if Trump wants to achieve his goals, preserving his predecessor’s manufacturing incentives is the only way.

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Ideas

How to Save America’s Power Grid in 6 Steps

“Energy dominance” has to start with energy reliability.

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Ideas

The Natural Gas Turbine Crisis

Investors are betting on gas to meet the U.S.’s growing electricity demand. Turbine manufacturers, however, have other plans.

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Ideas

Global Climate Politics Had a Rough 2024

In 2025, it’s time for stern resolve and bold maneuvers.

Voting.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

This year has reshaped the political landscape of climate action in ways few could have predicted. From the European Parliament to the US presidency, elections have upended the alliances and leadership structures that have traditionally driven climate progress. A world that as recently as 12 months ago thought it could rely on Europe as the steady hand of global leadership now finds the continent politically fracturing. Across the Atlantic, the United States is once again charting an unpredictable course, although one that will certainly take it further from sensible climate policy, while China continues to lead through industrial dominance rather than diplomatic consensus. It is, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal setting for tackling the most pressing issue of our time.

Europe’s political shifts may be the most concerning. On the surface it appears the continent’s commitment to climate has held, but underneath tensions are boiling. Once a bastion of ambitious climate policy, the European Union is now grappling with internal instability that risks derailing its leadership.

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Ideas

How Covid Shaped Climate Policy

Five years from the emergence of the disease, the world — and the climate — is still grappling with its effects.

A sun made of COVID.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

A Great Global Calamity

Five years ago this month, the novel coronavirus that would eventually become known as Covid-19 began to spread in Wuhan, China, kicking off a sequence of events that quite literally changed the world as we know it, the global climate not excepted.

The most dramatic effect of Covid on climate change wasn’t the 8% drop in annual greenhouse gas emissions caused by lockdowns and border closures in 2020, however. It wasn’t the crash in oil prices, which briefly went negative in April 2020. It wasn’t the delay of COP26 and of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. And it wasn’t, sadly, a legacy of green stimulus measures (some good efforts notwithstanding).

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