By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, September 20, 2021
It’s Climate Week in New York City, an event that, as it has every autumn since 2009, features a series of speeches, awards, presentations, and protests that coincide roughly with the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. I’m glad that it’s happening, but, as with the endless annual global climate negotiations (this year’s will be in November, in Glasgow), there’s a danger that we’ll come to think of the climate crisis as a standard piece of our mental furniture and as not what it actually is: a time-bound emergency that must be tackled full on, right now. The city has had Fashion Week since 1943, and the Toy Fair since 1903; but there’s clearly much more work to be done in climate than in couture or Candyland, and not nearly as much time.
In fact, the single most dangerous message of the moment is that we have some margin. The Times reported that the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, is weighing the possibilities for the $3.5-trillion budget bill now before the Senate, and that “Manchin’s version is widely expected to have less ambitious renewable energy requirements for electric power companies. His version could also reward utilities that build new power plants designed to burn natural gas.” The White House version of the bill would reward utility companies “if they increase the amount of clean electricity they supply to customers by 4 percent a year through 2030,” the Times added, but “Manchin is likely to lower that requirement to 3 percent a year or less, said two people familiar with the matter.”
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