A dark phase for CO2 control? The crisis is severe, but improvement likely

How should we make sense of this situation? What is the path ahead? Are we headed for a runaway climate change dystopia or can we do better?

This is a truly gloomy moment on the problem of global warming. The case for concern is made in four steps.

 

1. Many of us grew up on Daniel Yergin’s 1990 book, The Prize, which was about the oil industry. Writing in the Foreign Affairs, Mr Yergin, Peter Orszag, and Atul Arya recently argued that the energy transition was not going well (even before the policy shifts derived from Donald Trump taking charge as American President on January 20). They reminded us the share of hydrocarbons in the global energy mix had only dropped slightly, from 85 per cent in