How Not to Talk About Climate Change

Once upon a time, we almost solved climate change, but then human nature got in the way. This is the thesis of novelist Nathaniel Rich’s new article on climate change, comprising an entire issue of the New York Times Magazine, entitled “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

A home burns during the Carr Fire on July 27 in Redding, CA.

The decade in question is the 1980s, when, in Rich’s telling, a “handful of people” — a small group of scientists and policymakers, based entirely in the United States — nobly tried to save the rest of us from the doom now approaching. The story follows the environmental lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and the climate scientist James Hansen as they try to raise the alarm about the greenhouse effect, with help from some surprising allies — the occasional Republican senator and concerned representatives of oil companies. The climax comes in 1989 when the United States, under the “environmental president” George H. W. Bush, torpedoes a promising effort to reach an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions.

Read the story by Alyssa Battistoni from the Jacobin Magazine - “How Not to Talk About Climate Change.”