.billmckibben on the year in climate change: record heat and floods, a fossil-fuelled war, and major legislation aimed at reducing U.S. carbon emissions.
That number was thirty-five per cent in the nations of the European Union, reflecting the impact of the year’s other most important energy story, Russia’s. To call it a fossil-fuelled war is almost understatement: nearly half of Vladimir Putin’s export earnings come from oil and gas, and, in the early days of the conflict, the rapid rise in the global price of oil meant that his revenues rapidly grew, despiteimposed by Washington and Brussels.
Facing a cold winter, Europe rallied to find alternative supplies of natural gas, and the U.S. oil industry used the crisis as an excuse not just to haul in record profits but to dust off plans for a rapid expansion of liquid-natural-gas exports. In the short run, the war clearly cost the world some of its focus on the climate crisis.
So 2022 was a year of outsized pressure: pressure on physical systems to cope with more heat and more rain; pressure on political systems to cope with the fallout from floods and war. The pressures cut both ways, but, on balance, 2022 may have measurably speeded the energy transition—which would be good, because really the most ominous thing that’s happened in the past twelve months is just the passage of those months.
And what about the scoreboard at Mauna Loa? Based on the long historical trend, we can assume that there are about two parts per million more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there were this time last year, but we don’t know for sure. At the end of November, an eruption sent a flow of lava down the side of the volcano. It cut off the electricity supply to the COmonitor, severing what, for the past six decades, has been the most important data stream on the planet.
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