The world heats up -- and the US is AWOL

The fire in our time burns all around Europe. Not so much in northern California yet this year, where we've become somewhat used to seasons of flame. But we all know fire is coming. Meanwhile, across "old Europe," this.

Scene from Spain

In a Berlin international confab, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres spoke the obvious truth:

“Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction,” Guterres said in a video message to the assembled leaders on Monday. 

“What troubles me most is that, in facing this global crisis, we are failing to work together as a multilateral community. Nations continue to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future. We cannot continue this way,” Guterres said. 

“We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

Yet here in the United States, the Biden climate agenda is stalled, unlikely to be resurrected against unanimous Republican obstruction and a political class captured by fossil fuel kleptocrats. We're not getting done what must be done. The United States acts as an impediment to what the peoples of the world need.

It is worth putting our failure in a global context as well as a domestic one. Here's what that wise economic historian Adam Tooze has to say about the inability of Congress to move on climate:

Reading the commentary ... you would be forgiven for thinking that it implied a death warrant for the world. But such exaggerations reflect the shock of the moment rather than clear-headed analysis of America’s actual influence on world affairs in 2022. 

There may once have been a moment, in the 1990s perhaps, where global climate politics really did revolve around the battles in Washington DC. But today that is a deeply anachronistic view. America’s share of global emissions is less than 14 percent, half that of China, and its share is falling year by year. 

Of course, a world with a cooperative, United States committed to the energy transition would be a better world. Trump showed how the US can anchor an anti climate coalition. 

But even with an obstructive United States, the energy transition in Europe and large parts of Asia has a momentum that will carry it forward regardless. ...

As far as the world is concerned it merely confirms the fact that the US is an unreliable partner in the energy transition and has an in-built and profound structural bias towards fossil fuels. 

The collapse of Build Back Better is bad news, above all, for America itself. ...

It's not as if large majorities of people in this country don't understand a roasting planet will hurt us all and should be avoided as much as we are able. But the other emergencies of our lives -- rising prices, inadequate wages, scarcity of affordable housing, assaults on women's freedom -- crowd out our ability to focus on making politicians do what needs to be done. 

We aren't getting answers from the political class. I guess we have to be the political class; we must engage with every lever left in this flawed democracy to force the system to serve us all.