How to Make Your Daily Media Consumption Less Depressing

Climate-concerned readers and voters are in a tough spot. They don’t have the postelection coping options—escapism, despair, biding one’s time till the next election—open to some other people. The Biden administration’s climate policies, however historic, weren’t enough to cut emissions to the point that researchers say is needed by 2030, and analysis from U.K.-based climate news site Carbon Brief suggests the Trump administration could now add an extra four billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Simply accepting this and waiting for the next election isn’t really an option—either for the climate-concerned or for the many other groups whose immediate safety and well-being are in jeopardy.

If this realization feels crushing, it also comes with some advantages. Specifically, it offers a useful tool for sifting through the deluge of postelection “takes” and distinguishing what is helpful from what is unhelpful: If we are truly in an all-hands-on-deck moment (I think that we are), and if, as numerous experts have emphasized, every fraction of a degree of warming matters, then postelection analyses and prescriptions that don’t offer some discernible and actionable kernel of wisdom, lighting (however dimly) one plausible path forward, are pointless, and can be discarded without further ado.

Despair, for example—as numerous climate writers have pointed out over the past few years—just isn’t helpful. I no longer feel guilty just closing the window in which I’m reading a “take” of this variety, even if it’s artful, even if I otherwise enjoy this writer’s work, and moving onto something else.

Postmortems suggesting Democrats tack even further rightward—similarly, I don’t even bother hate-reading them unless I have to for work. As TNR’s Kate Aronoff observed this week, these analyses blaming “interest groups” for dragging Dems left are singularly unpersuasive for 2024, given that Harris ran on a platform that was nearly indistinguishable from that of some 1990s Republicans. And these analyses are particularly absurd from a climate perspective: If the message is that climate groups should sit down and shut up, then where does that leave any of us? On a rapidly heating planet in which even the insufficient Inflation Reduction Act—a product, in no small part, of ceaseless and effective climate advocacy—was never passed?

Identifying effective responses to an election that empowered a corrupt, coup-backing rapist to enact mass deportations that would destroy countless lives and kneecap the national economy and food supply is not an easy task. I haven’t seen anyone lay out anything like a comprehensive plan as of yet—and like many people, I’ve been looking. But here and there you can already see people compiling useful suggestions; filtering out the not so useful ones is an important part of moving that discourse forward. Likewise, the first step in figuring out what ethical escapism and rest might look like, or building a sustainable form of political engagement for the coming months and years, lies in identifying what can easily be discarded. It’s a kind of Modified KonMari rule for political discourse: Ask yourself, “Does this ‘take’ offer any discernible theory of change?” If not, let go of it with gratitude or a murmured expletive, according to your preference. Embrace the upside of urgency. That’s all I’ve got by way of advice for now.

Good News/Bad News

Some of the nonprofit organizations that mounted successful legal challenges to the first Trump administration’s environmentally rapacious policies say they are struggling with fundraising.

Stat of the Week
40%

That’s how many of the 204 agricultural lobbyists at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year, attended as part of official country delegations, “which lent them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations,” reports Rachel Sherrington in a joint analysis by DeSmog and The Guardian.

What I’m Reading

The Fossil Fuel Industry Continues to Exert Undue Influence Over COP29, Activists Say

A U.N. climate change conference held in the petro-state of Azerbaijan days after the United States elected a president fully in the pocket of the oil and gas industry was never going to be a cheery affair. And indeed, there’s more grim news: One estimate now suggests at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended the U.N. climate conference known as COP29. There isn’t a good reason why this pattern is allowed to persist, reports Bob Berwyn:

Most other major international negotiations at the United Nations have conflict-of-interest policies. For example, tobacco company involvement was strictly limited when the World Health Organization developed its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, with similar limits on pharmaceutical companies during ongoing discussions about a global pandemic treaty.

But in the case of the climate talks, corporate influence isn’t in keeping with those guidelines. The UNFCCC took small steps to increase transparency on who is attending the annual climate talks by requiring disclosures of affiliation during registration, but that does not eliminate conflicts of interest, said [Rachitaa Gupta with the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice].

Civil society groups have been pushing the UNFCCC Secretariat for years during regularly scheduled meetings to adopt clear conflict-of-interest rules for the climate talks, but she said the response has always been that it’s something that has to come from the member countries.

Read Bob Berwyn’s full report at Inside Climate News.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.