HOW ARE WE GOING TO EXPLAIN THIS

An irreverent, urgent look at climate change.

Building on a column he writes for the Dutch magazine De Correspondent, Mommers seeks a “much-needed antidote to despair” in the face of the grave transformations that are manifesting themselves around the planet: skies choked with particulates and the smoke from countless wildfires, rising sea levels, declining species and ecosystems. He finds some in the small and personal—giving up meat, for example, in his own life, though he realizes that since he still participates in the worldly economy, “that’s no reason to get all self-congratulatory”; or taking young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s advice and giving up flying, since, as she explained, “When you are in a crisis, you change your behavior.” It’s difficult to change one’s behavior, notes the author, when the most powerful economic forces remain committed to a fossil-fuel regime that accounts for the 42 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere yearly—a staggering figure, Mommers writes, so huge that, even if we covered the planet with scrubbers, we could remove only 1% of the total of annual emissions “at a cost of $400 billion per year.” After surveying the nightmarish damage to world agriculture and environmental systems, Mommers finds odd solace in the coronavirus pandemic, which has had the effect of reducing those emissions by 7%. The problem is that in order to keep the global temperature from creeping up by a catastrophic 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’d have to maintain that 7% drop annually for another decade, which probably won’t happen. Mommers avoids hectoring or preaching to the choir, and he does turn up at least a flicker of hope in remaking the economy with an eye to sustainability. “Not enough is happening yet,” he writes, “but a green course is now visible and attractive.”

A welcome reminder that there are things we can do to heal the planet that go beyond useless half-measures.