The Fiery Trial

Copernicus 1.5C Data + Los Angeles Fires + Banks/Insurers Giving Up = BREAK GLASS

A McDonalds in Altadena, California is engulfed by the Eaton Fire. Credit: Suart Palley (https://www.instagram.com/stuartpalley/)

Between Borodino in the Napoleonic Wars and the Somme in WW1, it’s difficult to identify a single day bloodier than the Battle of Antietam. On 17th September 1862, more than 23,000 casualties in a single day resulted when the Army of Northern Virginia commanded by Robert E. Lee was stopped (just) in Maryland before it could encircle Washington, DC.

Five days later, despite the battle being virtually a draw, Abraham Lincoln did something previously unthinkable. He declared all enslaved persons in the rebelling US States to be forever free, effective 1st January 1863.

By December, the war was entering its third year; the outcome far from certain. In fact, as better-generaled Confederate armies continued to pull off unlikely success after unlikely success, with photography and cheap newsprint putting the gruesome reality of industrial war on kitchen tables, with technology that far outran tactics giving Matthew Brady’s early cohort of photographers plenty of material, public opinion in the North began to turn against continuation of the war.

Some years later, Germany’s dyspeptic statesman Otto von Bismarck supposedly quipped: “Providence protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.”

As a guy who had to be a strategic, tactical, diplomatic, and political genius making almost no mistakes over 25 years to pull off and consolidate German unification, it must have chafed Otto to see the post Civil War United States well on its way to being a global power almost without breaking a sweat, when in December 1862 it was on the verge of collapse and dissolution.

After spending the majority of my life as an expat, I understand how offensive, or just tiresome, American exceptionalism sounds. But when Bismarck offered that grudging respect, it’s easy to imagine he had in mind the insane improbability that a savage backwater like the US would be led at that precise moment by someone who could wield words to make sense of the slaughter and infuse it with purpose.

Lincoln wrote a long message to Congress in December. It concluded with some of his most-quoted lines:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

Copernican Revolution

This week, Europe’s Copernicus climate observatory reported a long-dreaded milestone. In 2024, global average temperatures were more than 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and almost certainly the hottest year since homo sapiens first walked out of Africa, onto the Arabian Peninsula.

The 2015 Paris Agreement sets as a goal that the world should aim to prevent warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees C. So exceeding it for an entire calendar year is a big effing deal, even if the “technically, ackshully” reply-guy reaction to it is that it only counts over a 20-year-average of temperature change.¹

While Wicked Problems has mad respect for Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi and the whole Bloomberg Green team, I couldn’t help but notice that his Zero podcast’s pre-emption episode referred to that 1.5C limit as “arbitrary”. Six times. Zahra Hirji told Akshat:

1.5 C as a goal is such a tricky thing and there are so many like caught up emotions in it. I think a lot of scientists sort of hate it as a goal because in a way it feels rather arbitrary. In the sense that there's nothing that is different at 1.49 versus 1.5 versus 1.51 C. You know, those small increments– we can't actually tease out a lot of differences there. And so to them, it's just we need to talk about trying to reduce or keep warming down as much as possible, and every 10th of degree matters.

To be fair, Zahra immediately followed that with a vanilla sort of explanation of why “goals matter”, and that the 1.5 goal was instrumental in driving a lot of change, helping us shift from a path towards greater than 4C warming by 2100 to (checks notes) a bit less than 3C. And the idea that any serious person argues that 1.5 is a cliff edge, over which once we pass there is no point to stopping emissions, seems like a straw man². But I think people far cleverer than me like Zahra and Akshat are in danger of missing two key points.

1. Stop calling 1.5 ‘arbitrary’. Please. The inclusion of 1.5C in the text of the Paris Agreement wasn’t some late-night Pastis-fuelled back-of-the-Gauilloise-packet ‘arbitrary’ compromise.³ It was the scientific consensus at the time, demanded by the 44-member Association of Small Island States before they would sign on to the Paris text, as a line beyond which places like Kiribati, Vanuatu, the Maldives, low-lying parts of Bangladesh, and many more, would be considered more likely than not to become uninhabitable in this century - whether because of inundation or extreme weather. If there’s anything arbitrary here it’s waiting for a complete solar revolution as defined by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 is the reason to mark the occasion. ⁴

2. Time = lives in adaptation. Downplaying the significance of the failure to remain below 1.5C is not cost-free, damage-free, or values-free. Argument during the International Court of Justice climate change hearings last month, spearheaded by small island state law students led by Cynthia Hounihuy, underlined the damage already underway. As a practical matter, Dr. Stephen Lezak of Oxford University wrote in the New York Times last week how long it takes to do “managed retreat” in a way that minimises avoidable harms during the process. How long? Decades. So waiting to act on this information is to condemn tens or hundreds of millions of people to avoidable harm, or death.

I do get it. Recognising that countless gigabytes of Corporate Sustainability reports have given to plans to conform to 1.5C limits by governments and corporations is now a dead letter is a ball-ache to end all ball-aches. And to acknowledge the impossibility of, at best, having ‘overshoot’ before getting back to 1.5C carries with it some pretty unpleasant legal, political, and economic consequences.

Most of the people who will read this are on the side of the angels, as it were. But arguing amongst ourselves how many of them will fit on the head of the climate pin is a monstrous misallocation of resources when people desperate to stop any meaningful action to change course are in the ascendancy around the world - even as its most photographed-part burn.

Logic and common sense would make you think that the plain evidence of climate-fuelled disasters would motivate people towards climate action. You would be wrong. Because the universe is perverse AF.

L.A. Is Burning

Because Akshat is one of the smartest people I've met working on these issues, and for simple fairness, I want to point out that his newsletter yesterday did a masterfully succinct job connecting the Copernicus 1.5 news to the Los Angeles fires⁵.

One of my BlueSky climate crushes, Chris Baraniuk, wrote a terrific explainer for BBC on the climate-inflected factors that have made the ongoing Los Angeles fires so devastating.

In addition to the reminder that not only Small Island Developing States or places like Bangladesh are at risk from effects of climate disruption, the Los Angeles fires have offered a very different and perhaps more important lesson. Next week (assuming his trying to disrupt actual Nazis⁶ the AfD striving to take power in Germany permits) I will interview our friend the activist and self-described ‘gay communist’ Tadzio Müller on the anniversary of our first chat. Careful listeners will know I keep quoting his haunting line, contra the bromide ‘the arc of history is long but bends towards justice’:

In the face of climate collapse: “The arc of history is short and bends towards fascism.”

Back in the US, his warning increasingly sounds like he’s read a playbook some are running.

President-elect Donald Trump and his Troll-in-Chief Elon Musk used the fires as an opportunity to blame California politicians for the fires. In an interview with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, historian Nicole Hemmer put this moment in context:

It’s an extended view that supports both Tadzio’s pithy observation but also the 1000-page thought experiment of novelist Stephen Markley in his The Deluge⁷ that ended in the same place.

Like JD Vance’s jujitsu move to convince those affected by climate-supercharged Hurricane Helene in North Carolina that the real problem was immigrants, not the effects of burning fossil fuels, seizing on a natural disaster has proven an extremely effective political weapon for those on the right. We now see that here in England as Reform UK demagogues climate-inflected disasters as opportunities to shellack local government failures at preventing a disaster.

Stopping climate action while reaping political benefits from the effects of the failure to act is, if you take a breath, something to which you have to give props for its diabolical beauty as a move.

Follow the Money

A few months ago you could be forgiven for thinking that the financial sector - as the Ur-rational-actor - would be the place where the brakes would be applied when counting the costs of disasters like Los Angeles. Hoo Boy.

Just a week ago, California decided “insurers will be required to increase writing of comprehensive policies in wildfire-distressed areas amounting to at least 85% of their statewide market share”.

In one way, this may be good news. It suggests that big insurers will be prevented from repeating past sins of “redlining” that write off whole postal codes based on presumptions, in favour of more granular, data-driven, site-specific risk profiles like those offered by previous guests Climate X, VIDA, or Orotech.

In another way, it’s a mixed signal - it’s being interpreted in some quarters that governments like California’s are willing to compel market actors to bail out property owners who build and/or fail to fire-proof structures that people who chose to build further away from hazard will now have to subsidise.⁸

That fun follows the Winterval announcement by several of the most important US finance houses that they are abandoning previous pledges to adhere to the Paris goal of keeping global warming below 1.5C, by formally exiting the Mark Carney-inspired Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero - leaving precisely 3 US banks left in the group.

So a few things we die-hard “capitalism can still save the planet” types were counting on - the ability of markets to require actors to acknowledge their self interest beyond the next quarter and the ability of government to force that in the face of market failure - turn out to be mere wisps on the wind.

Imagine Better

Bit heavy-handed to quote Lincoln? Sure. Does this strike your being as a moment of lightness, however unbearable?

Go back and read Lincoln’s words. If a moment ever called for an acknowledgement that “quiet dogmas of the past” are no longer helpful; that the “fiery trial” of the “stormy present” will not wait for us to put down the phone; that to us, against what we would prefer, has been presented this dilemma - this is now.

As Chatham House’s Laurie Laybourn said better than I could:

It's critical that the connection between climate impact and climate cause is clear at all times. It's easier to see in LA. But harder for people to grasp when it comes to the complex interaction between worsening extreme weather, destruction of crops, and overall inflation. These cascading consequences have to be at the heart of the climate conversation and our sense making.

Adaptation must now have parity of esteem with mitigation. Musk, Trump, and others are partly able to make these arguments because state capacity has been withdrawn and so places *are very badly prepared* to handle climate extremes, which are anyway worse than many expected (partly itself a result of underinvestment in risk assessment and rubbish assessment methods). The consequences of low resilience are fertile ground for nativist politics, which focuses on symptoms not causes.

More adaptation must be complementary with mitigation: what makes us better able to deal with climate symptoms can accelerate action on climate causes.

But it would be absolutely barking f*cking mad not to acknowledge this moment of failure, that we have (deliberately or not) freighted with so much meaning, to take a beat and - despite the inclement political weather - recommit to the notion that the last, best hope is a way forward that is generous, peaceful, and just; and which, if followed, the world would forever applaud.

Usually snipped from Lincoln’s quote is the line just before that quoted above:

We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?"

1. Does any person reading this thinking that waiting until 2050 or so to decide whether shit went sideways in 2024 is anything other than batshit crazy?

2. If there is, I’d love a link to that to prove me wrong.

3. Much as I would have loved to be in the room for that.

4. In 2018, the IPCC reported on the potential effects of breaching the 1.5C limit.

5. Although because I’m a heartless bastard I’ll note the word “arbitrary” does not appear in the newsletter regarding 1.5.

6. Thanks Elon Musk, who declared the AfD a ‘common sense’ party about which he agreed is just a ‘libertarian, conservative’ mainstream political force, and that Hitler was a ‘communist’. Holy smokes.

7. Our interview with Stephen is one of our faves.

8. As someone who grew up in New York in the 80s/90s I’m familiar with market failure in insurance. “Assigned risk” was a state-mandated way of ensuring that 17-25 yr old dudes would be able to buy insurance, at extortionate rates, because drivers of that demo are overwhelmingly muppets who should not be able to drive - but 20C US infrastructure required that for them to participate in the economy.