As North America slept, delegates from around the world concluded the global climate conference in Dubai, when the chair—local oilman Sultan al-Jaber—quick-gavelled through an agreement that included a sentence calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

That may not seem like much—it is, after all, the single most obvious thing one could possibly say about climate change, akin to “in an effort to reduce my headache, I am transitioning away from hitting myself in the forehead with a hammer.”

And by itself it will accomplish nothing. As Samoa, speaking on behalf of the Small Island Nations, said a few minutes later, “we have come to the conclusion that the course correction that is needed has not been secured.”

But it is—and this is important—a tool for activists to use henceforth. The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on—especially the discussions about any further expansion of the fossil fuel energy. There may be barriers to shutting down operations (what the text of the agreement obliquely refers to as “national circumstances, pathways and approaches.”) But surely, if the language means anything at all, it means no opening no more new oil fields, no more new pipeline. No more newLNG export terminals.

In fact, that last point—LNG export terminals—will almost certainly be the first real test of whether this agreement means anything. The American envoy John Kerry, who celebrated his 80th birthday during the talks, could be forgiven for thinking of it as a crowning achievement. Though he acknowledged stronger language would have been nice, he said “I think everybody here should be pleased that in a world of Ukraine and the Middle East war and all the other challenges of a planet that is foundering, this is a moment where multilateralism has actually come together and people have taken individual interests and attempted to define the common good,” Kerry said. “That is hard. That is the hardest thing in diplomacy, the hardest thing in politics.”

But Kerry’s job isn’t done. He needs to return home and convince the White House to pause the granting of new export licenses for the ongoing LNG buildout, a project so enormous that by itself it could produce more greenhouse gas emissions than all of Europe. If the White House agrees—and Dubai saw the release of a letter from 230 environmental organizations urging just such a pause—than we will know there was something real in all this endless talk.

And in that case, the bland sentence—“transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner”—would join at least two others in the long history of the climate talks as historically significant.

The first came in 1995, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its second assessment report, said “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” That bland sentence—bland for the same reason, because it also had to get past every government in the world—was the death knell for the argument that climate change wasn’t real; after it, no serious person (admittedly a category with many exceptions) could argue there was no need to do anything.

The second came in 2015, in the preamble to the Paris accords, when (at the urging of those same small island states) the text included a pledge to “substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to hold global temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” That recognition of 1.5 degrees changed the debate—but only because activists and scientists used it to demand that governments and businesses identify a “1.5 degree path,” which increased the seriousness of those plans. We’re not going to stay below 1.5 degrees—but that sentence may, in the end, knock half a degree off how much the planet warms.

If today’s sentence is to matter, it will need that same kind of activism, especially since the fossil fuel industry—the most well-represented ‘nation’ at the talks—managed to lard the text with wiggle words. For instance, the agreement “recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security,” which the fracked gas industry is going to interpret as permission for them to go on pumping. We need to insist that the clear, plain meaning of the language is, the fossil fuel era is over. No more new digging and drilling.

What I’m trying to say is, today’s agreement is literally meaningless—and potentially meaningful. But the diplomats are done now—the rest of us are going to have to supply that meaning.

In other climate and energy news:

A big night tonight at Third Act, where we celebrate our second birthday with Senator Bernie Sanders. Join us on the zoom—and tomorrow night we kick off a multi-part training series on nonviolent direct action. I’ll be talking about the history, from Thoreau on—and it will be good prep for taking action in the new year!

Colombia’s interesting new president, Gustavo Petro, is worth listening to on the climate crisis, and the obstacles to addressing it:

“I think that the rise of the extreme right is fundamentally driven by fear,” he said. “Fear is weighing on the mentality of the middle classes, which are very powerful in Europe and the United States, about losing consumption, comfort, the standard of living, which no doubt may grow with the transformation.” That fear, he says, will grow because “migratory flows are going to increase in the world if we don’t act quickly. And it is simply because the tropics are running out of water. Migration will grow to become hundreds of millions. That is foreseeable, and so a construct is emerging as in Germany in the 1930s, based on the fear of difference. And anti-migration policies deepen, and the middle and upper classes, even in white Europe, begin to construct a sense of barbarity, of the barbarians who are coming.”

That is a very reasonable description of where we are, and where we may be going. And Petro has acted forthrightly to do what he can, stopping oil exploration in the sections of the Amazon under his control, something his Brazilian counterpart Lula has refused to do.

“The Amazon jungle, with rising temperatures, may burn, with which all that mass of CO₂ absorbed for millennia returns to the atmosphere. That is one of the points of no return. So, caring for the Amazon jungle is one of the greatest objectives of a struggle against the climate crisis.

“Brazil has to undergo a transformation of its mindset,” he said.

“It is much easier in Colombia. In Colombia we understand the importance of the jungle, though there are predatory factors at work that have to do with illegal mining [and] money laundering associated with drug trafficking, which has become a motor of depredation there.

“Yet in Brazil the idea of transforming the jungle into large agrarian plantations, in large estates, has been developing for a long time. Many indigenous and environmental leaders have died, have been assassinated, because of that struggle.

“Politically, it is difficult in Brazil to propose the idea of saving the jungle and not exploiting it commercially, its lands, its territories. That is why a Bolsonaro was possible,” he said.

A fine account in the Times of bus rapid transit systems, one of the cheap and obvious solutions to climate and congestion problems.

“For so many people, buses are just not sexy. Light rail is sexy, streetcars are sexy,” said Jeanette Sadik-Khan, a transit analyst. There has been a bias, she said, toward heavy infrastructure projects that are seen as a spur to development. But rail projects are less flexible, can cost billions of dollars and may take decades to complete.

Improving bus systems also allows cities to take advantage of infrastructure the U.S. has already invested hundreds of billions of dollars in: roads.

I saw and wrote about the very first of these systems, in Curitiba Brazil, in the 1990s; they’ve been widely adopted in South America and Asia, and I think they’re immensely wise. “Subways on the street,” they can move massive numbers of people cheaply. But only if they’re given priority over cars, which is always the problem in American transit policy.

Allowing the fossil fuel industries to wield their power in the UN’s climate talks means pulling punches against the greatest existential threat faced by humanity, all to spare those companies a threat to their bottom lines.

Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Those of us with history in the Civil Rights Movement know that taking on entrenched power and changing the status quo requires dogged tenacity and seizing key moments to break down barriers.

The United Nations Climate Change conference, know as COP28, happening now in Dubai could be one of those key moments for tackling the climate crisis. To ensure we truly create a better world for us all, we must include the participation of every country.

The biggest obstacle is the entrenched power and stubborn influence of the fossil fuel industry, the very cause of the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming. The industry has had a stranglehold on international climate talks, and this year is showing up to the conference in greater force than perhaps ever before.

Hundreds of oil and gas industry lobbyists usually descend on the climate change conferences. This year, by some unofficial estimates from reporters and watchdog groups, it looks like the number of lobbyists and industry representatives could be more than double what it was at last year’s conference in Egypt.

The purpose of the summit is to assess and improve global efforts to curb global warming. The only way to do that is by drastically reducing emissions, far more than we’re already doing, and that means completely phasing out all fossil fuels.

Two reports released late last month, one by the UN and one by the Rhodium Group consulting firm, reached the same conclusion: The most likely projected temperature increase by the end of this century will be about 3 degrees Celsius, based on current trends. Scientists say that any increase over 2 degrees would be catastrophic. The current trajectory puts us well above the 1.5 C target established by the landmark Paris Agreement from the conference in 2015.

Added to the backdrop of these international negotiations is that this is the hottest year on record, with resulting floods, fires, superstorms and other extreme weather events impacting humanity in increasingly undeniable ways.

With the urgency so crystal clear, there’s no way that the industry driving the climate crisis should be empowered to the degree it is to protect its own profits at the expense of our planet. By allowing oil and gas companies to have so much power and influence, we’re pulling our punches against the greatest existential threat faced by humanity, all to spare those companies a threat to their bottom lines.

An oil baron as host

Of course, plenty of controversy has swirled around the lead-up to this year’s summit. There’s been no shortage of newspaper ink, and website pixels, dedicated to commentary about the host country, the United Arab Emirates, being a nation built on oil. UAE is part of OPEC — which has played a significant role in obstructing progress in past climate negotiations — and has an oil and gas company which is one of the largest in the world, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC. The CEO of ADNOC, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, is serving as president of this year’s summit.

Having an oil baron at the helm of the world’s most important event focused on curtailing greenhouse gas emissions is an irony that’s been hard to swallow for many. At the organization I lead, Sierra Club, we decided to send a delegation to this year’s conference anyway, in the spirit of hope and determination, as this is a cause too great and too important to be deterred from our efforts — no matter how many foxes are let into the henhouse.

A larger concern of mine has been the voting rules. UN climate talks require all parties involved (in this case, 197 countries plus the European Union) to be unanimous on the adoption of any agreement. On its face, the requirement for consensus agreement is a way to add greater legitimacy to the conference’s outcomes and ensure that Global South countries, and those most drastically impacted by the climate crisis, have an equal say. However, it also means that a single oil- and gas-rich country, or a small group of them, has veto power over any agreement. It’s a structural weakness of these summits that has been exploited for decades by oil- and gas-rich nations (including the United States) to impede progress.

Just think about how much power that gives an industry that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lobbying. Even if every government on the planet was in basic agreement on some new framework or commitment, fossil fuel companies would only need to persuade — or co-opt — the leaders of a single nation to have a game-ending proxy vote.

It’s no surprise that the fossil fuel industry is focused on securing its own future and increasing its wealth. However, that focus is completely at odds with the entire purpose of climate talks like this one, which is supposed to be the health and well-being of humanity, and protecting our fragile planet. To have oil and gas interests influencing global climate talks undermines the whole endeavor.

For now, we maintain hope that the gravity of the crisis drives the 197 participating countries to agree on robust, meaningful action. If that doesn’t happen, we need to turn our focus to overhauling the rules for future climate talks so that fossil fuel companies, or the countries they influence, can’t continue to sabotage the global effort.

When 2023 began, it seemed likely to be just one more year in the ongoing collapse of the world’s climate system. We were at the tail end of a long La Niña cold period in the Pacific, which meant that, although global temperatures had been near record levels for the past few years, they hadn’t quite topped 2016, the period of the last strong El Niño, which brought the hottest year to date—not to mention considerable havoc from Australia to Alaska.

Amid signs of that Pacific warm current starting to build anew, climatologists looked ahead to nextyear as the time when all hell might break loose. Experts said it was possible that in 2024 we could go past 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures—the mark that we had pledged to try to avoid at the Paris climate summit just eight years ago.

Instead, dire things began happening much, much sooner. This spring, the keepers of various data sets pointed out that sea-surface temperatures around the globe were setting records. In July, a buoy off the Florida Keys recorded what some meteorologists believe is the highest marine temperature ever measured, setting in at 101.1 degrees, which is right about where people keep their hot tubs. That extreme heat soon moved onshore; because the northern hemisphere has more land than the southern, this is always the time of year when consolidated global temperatures reach their height. And on July 3rd scientists reported that, if you averaged in all the earth’s weather stations, ships, ocean buoys, and satellites, as an expert explained to the Washington Post, the planet had recorded the hottest day in the history of measurements. Thermometers stretch back only a few centuries, but scientists are good at assembling proxy markers from glacial cores and lake sediments; they said that this may have been one of the hottest days in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years, which takes us about back to the point when people began using shells as decorations. July 4th was hotter, and then July 6th broke the record again. As for the year as a whole, data from the World Meteorological Agency show that, as the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, told the global climate talks in Dubai last week, we can safely say, even with weeks to go, that 2023 will take the title.

The northern hemisphere began, as always, to tilt away from the sun as the year wore on, and the absolute average temperatures began to decline from those all-time peaks. But climatologists have another way of keeping track—they measure deviations from the norm for a particular date, comparing, say, September of 2023 with all the other Septembers for which we have records, and with the baseline for Septembers from the period before the Industrial Revolution had begun to warm the world. And in September we, in fact, went past that 1.5-degree mark. This would be an incredibly grim and remarkable milestone, except that in November, on the Friday before Thanksgiving to be exact, we also went past two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. Because the Paris accords—again, signed just eight years ago—committed the world to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels,” this was a signal moment. It didn’t mean that we’d utterly failed—the way these things are officially recorded, it will take several years for meteorologists, averaging annual temperatures over a two-decade span, to conclude that we’ve passed 1.5°C for good—but it was stunning. Almost no one had predicted that it could come this quickly; by autumn, we were living in a world far different than any that human civilization had known. And not a pleasant one: in the United States, insured losses from thunderstorms and related hazards were set to top fifty billion dollars for the first time in a single year, and in Canada wildfires had smashed records (and produced triple the amount of carbon dioxide that all the heating and cooking and flying and driving and cooling that Canadians will do this year).

The damage from climate disasters was obviously infinitely worse in poorer parts of the world—in September, a record rainfall in Libya destroyed two dams and washed more than ten thousand people out to sea—but, as the smoke from the Canadian wildfires drifted down over the political and economic power corridor of Atlantic America, producing some of the worst air ever measured in Washington, D.C., there was the unmistakable stench of political failure. Having ignored the warnings that Jim Hansen, the most farseeing of climatologists, offered in testimony before the Senate thirty-five years ago, we were now seeing in real time what that negligence wrought: the jet stream and the Gulf Stream faltering, and heat waves so enormous and unprecedented that even the otherwise unstoppable Taylor Swift had to postpone a concert in Rio, as the temperature topped a hundred and six degrees. Cruel summer, indeed. Cruel year.

And yet something else happened in 2023. Almost simultaneous with the breakout in temperature, there was a breakout in the installation of renewable energy, especially solar power, around the world. The story of the past thirty-five years was that we’d clearly decided as a society that it wasn’t worth spending enough money to forestall climate change. But the cost of clean energy has dropped so far that it is now possible that saving the planet might be a corollary of saving cash. This ongoing drop in price is more than a decade old, but sometime in the past few years it crossed an invisible line, making it cheaper than hydrocarbons, and this was the year when that reality finally translated into dramatic action on the ground. By midsummer, just as the world was seeing those record temperatures, it was also seeing the installation of about a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels a day—that is, we were installing the equivalent of a nuclear power plant every twenty-four hours, but spread out, instead of in one place.

A large number of those solar installations were going up in China, the world’s primary consumer of energy, but there were also heartening increases in the nations of the European Union (where the invasion of Ukraine has sparked a speedy push to get off Russian hydrocarbons) and in the U.S., where the first tranches of cash from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are starting to spur clean-energy progress on all fronts. Renewable-energy installation has been increasing all decade, but so has fossil-fuel production, leading some to despair that clean energy would never truly undercut coal, oil, and gas. But this year the growth was so dramatic that, by year’s end, data were showing that total greenhouse emissions in the E.U. and U.S. were falling, and that if China’s emissions weren’t already in decline, they are expected to by the first quarter of next year, seven years ahead of schedule. It appears that you simply can’t put up that many solar panels without it beginning to change reality.

This explosive growth in clean energy—if it continues to accelerate exponentially—offers some hope of limiting the ultimate rise in global temperatures, which at the moment continue on a path toward a civilization-challenging rise of 2.5 or three degrees Celsius (or more, as Jim Hansen noted last month). Though rising interest rates have begun to interfere with all kinds of energy development, the price of solar energy continues to drop, and there’s no obvious limiting factor to its spread. (For example, according to an analysis, putting solar panels only in the cornfields currently devoted to growing ethanol could provide enough power for all electricity uses in America.) There are plenty of other technologies we’re spending money on, including small nuclear reactors and giant carbon-sucking machines, that may or may not someday play a role in the climate fight, but, for all the furor they produce, they seem unlikely to make much difference anytime soon. In the next few years, while the planet’s climate system teeters on the edge of breaking, it’s sun, wind, and batteries that matter. They’re cheap, and they’re ready.

But every bit of good news for the planet—such as November’s reporting from Reuters that sixty-eight planned gas plants had been abandoned or postponed around the globe because the cost of giant batteries coupled with renewable energy had rendered them obsolete—is bad news for the fossil-fuel industry. That industry, of course, has the wherewithal to fight back, and it is doing just that—domestically, by trying to undercut public acceptance of E.V.s, and internationally, by locking in export markets for fossil fuels. Last month, the Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC reported that leaked briefing notes show that the United Arab Emirates had been aiming to use its presidency at this month’s global climate talks to make oil and gas deals around the world; meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is investing to help an American company bring back the supersonic jet, which burns three times as much fuel per seat when compared with normal airplanes, to passenger aviation. The single biggest example, though, is in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, where, despite declining domestic gas demand, the nation’s oil and gas companies are producing record amounts of it—and hoping to ship more and more of it overseas.

It’s clear that we won’t outright win the climate fight—right now, Somalia is suffering from epic floods, and Mexico City is restricting water use in the face of a tenacious drought. But, as renewable energy expands, the race should grow steadily more competitive, unless, of course, politics intervenes. A Republican victory in November would probably mean retrenchment—Donald Trump is a climate denier who in his first Administration withdrew the United States from the Paris accords, but even Nikki Haley was recently seen rebuking Ron DeSantis for trying to limit fracking in Florida. The world simply can’t afford another four-year time-out from aggressive climate action. This year showed the world on two paths, one utterly disastrous and the other at least a little redemptive; 2024 may decide which one we actually follow.

If you live in Detroit or another part of Michigan where there’s a looming threat of bodily harm from fossil fuel pollution, it just got a little easier to breathe a sigh of relief … and to maintain your ability to breathe in general.

The historic Clean Energy Future Package and Clean Energy and Jobs Act, just recently signed into law by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, will greatly accelerate the state’s transition to the exclusive use of clean power sources like wind and solar.

That’s a victory for Michiganders and for the country’s goals of slashing the pollution that fuels climate change and harms our health. It’s also a major win for environmental justice, hard-hit communities in a state, and workers.

Michigan’s codified commitment to fighting the pollution driving climate change is inherently good news for the communities of color that bear a disproportionate burden of the effects of the crisis, and the benefits go even further. New incentives in the bills to make buildings energy efficient will have an outsized positive impact for these communities, where a higher number of the homes are old, drafty, and not energy efficient.

Finally, air pollution from many of the power and industrial plants, which are also disproportionately located in these communities, will be reduced by the state’s mandates for clean energy. This is huge for all Michiganders, and especially for those communities where public health is suffering from pollution.

The Detroit tri-cities area – encompassing Detroit, River Rouge, and Ecorse – and other parts of Michigan experiencing the worst air pollution are predominantly Black or Black and Latino. The Harvard Medical School Primary Care Review has pointed out that within the two zip codes that make up Southwest Detroit alone, “there are more than 150 facilities that emit toxic fumes, gasses, chemicals, and particulate matter.”

Black residents make up 80% of one of those zip codes, 48217, a statistic noted at an October gathering of activists, near the Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s refinery in Southwest Detroit, by Ember McCoy, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, in discussing the disproportionate impact of air pollution on the city’s residents.

According to 2019 figures from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, adult residents of Detroit were 46% more likely to have asthma than the statewide average. And within Detroit, Black residents were hospitalized for asthma three times as often as white residents. And that’s just asthma.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says this type of pollution is also known to increase rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological and immune disorders, and other health concerns. And, as McCoy also noted at that Detroit panel discussion, “certain pollutants, when combined, as they are in the air, are worse together than they are alone individually … but we still measure them and regulate them as if they’re acting separately.”

So, yes, a lot still needs to be done. Especially in terms of how these chemical and particulate pollutants are regulated at the federal level. Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the positive action that states like Michigan are taking right now and the example it sets for other states.

There’s a lot to be hopeful about in the clean energy bills’ impact on public health. The bills also set a powerful example for how to help ensure a just transition away from fossil fuels with strong protections for labor. Part of the clean energy package is the creation of the Community and Worker Economic Transition Office.

The office will develop a plan and coordinate efforts to address the impact on workers in the shift from fossil fuels to renewables, helping to ensure that no worker is left behind. By delivering historic federal action in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has already given states a powerful way to capitalize on massive federal investments in their economies and a green future for us all.

That’s exactly what Michigan is doing, and doing it right. In addition to the billions that Michigan has already secured in federal investment dollars, a recent report by the Michigan-based 5 Lakes Energy shows that passing the 100% clean energy legislation could mean over 160,000 additional quality jobs over the next decade and $7.8 billion more in investments by 2050, which is more than twice what Michigan would expect to receive without enacting these policies.

Thanks to the IRA, states now have an unprecedented opportunity to address the harm done by climate change while also jumpstarting economic development, creating jobs, moving towards energy independence, improving the health and lives of their residents, and leading on environmental justice.