Bill McKibben writes:

We’re clearly in a climate moment: it’s possible that more marchers have walked more miles in the past month than in the previous decade combined; more words have been written, more pictures published, more speeches given, more promises made, more hope expressed and anger declared. But, if the United States is going to act as it must in the years ahead, it needs to shed more than its current President. It also must stop telling itself a persistent fable about its own conduct: namely, that it has made great progress already in cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions. It hasn’t.

I started obsessing about this myth in mid-September, on a day when I was sitting behind Greta Thunberg, as she testified before a House of Representatives committee hearing. All eyes were focussed on the Swedish schoolgirl, who confounded the chamber by offering not testimony but a copy of the landmark 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a simple gesture that seemed temporarily to disarm the representatives. But politicians seem never to be at a loss for words for long, and so they took their allotted minutes to, in effect, illustrate their misconceptions of the essential truth of the climate debate. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican of Illinois, went first, patiently explaining to Thunberg that, “while some may say that the United States needs to be the leader of combating climate change, I would say that we already are. Since 2005, global emissions have increased by twenty per cent, but the United States’ emissions have decreased by more than the next twelve emission-reducing countries combined.” A few minutes later, Garret Graves, a Republican of Louisiana, repeated the sentiment, claiming, “Contrary to popular belief, the United States—the United States—is the country that has led the world in greenhouse-gas reductions.”

The problem with this claim is that it is not true. It’s not true because U.S. carbon emissions actually climbed last year, as the Trump Administration’s policies began to play out. But it’s not true for a much deeper reason, too—one that predates the current White House. The crucial distinction that politicians are missing about our climate predicament is this: what we have reduced over the past twenty years is our emission of carbon dioxide, and we did that mostly by replacing coal-fired power plants with gas-fired power plants. Burning gas produces less carbon dioxide than burning coal. But carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas. The second most important contributor to climate change is methane—CH₄. And, when you frack the countryside for natural gas to burn in power plants, lots of methane leaks out at every stage of the process, from drilling to combustion. So: less carbon dioxide, more methane. [Continue reading…]