The Biggest Lesson About Climate Change From 2019

We need to change how our economy is powered — and that will require politics

On December 11, two things happened that caught the attention of those invested in the fight against climate change, which at this point should include all of us. TIME magazine named 16-year-old Greta Thunberg its 2019 person of the year, lauding her for “creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change.” And, Saudi Aramco — Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company and the largest producer of crude oil in the world — had the biggest initial public offering on record, raising more than $25 billion and ending its first day of trading with a valuation of $1.88 trillion, $600 billion more than its nearest competitor, Apple.

More than anything else, these two events — the recognition of a truly fresh voice and the market’s embrace of the company with the single largest carbon footprint in the world — tell us where the world stands on climate change. Thunberg, who this time last year was holding a lonely vigil outside the Swedish Parliament as part of the nascent “School Strike for Climate,” represents the rise of a strong climate activist movement, one that has embraced increasingly radical tactics and is backed up by growing public support. Aramco represents how entrenched fossil fuels remain in the global economy, despite all that effort. Thunberg shows us how far we came in 2019, while Aramco’s multi-trillion dollar valuation shows us how far we still have to go.

Spend long enough reporting on climate change, and you can develop a nasty case of deja vu. Every year ends with a UN climate summit — 2019’s edition stumbled to a close in Madrid in mid-December — where the same fights are had between developed and developing countries, between Europe and the United States. Carbon dioxide emissions will likely hit a record high in 2019, and with them, the same warnings that we have only a few years left to drastically cut CO2 emissions or face global catastrophe. Scientists and environmentalists employ the same messages, doomsaying marbled with glimmers of hope. There are a few extreme weather events linked to climate change, like December’s record-breaking heat in…