What It Really Takes to Fix a Monstrosity Like Climate Change

Mr. Schendler is the senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen One and the author of the forthcoming book Terrible Beauty: Reckoning With Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul. I live at the base of Basalt Mountain, an ancient volcano that tops out at nearly 11,000 feet in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado. An eruption 10 million years ago contributed to the contours of the landscape. In the mornings I drink strong coffee from a U.S. Forest Service mug, and I look out the window at the light on the peaks, at the wild turkeys pecking in the yard, at the deer so tame that I could touch them. I have spent my career working on climate change not theoretically but in the trenches, crawling under trailers to insulate them under a federal government program to help low-income families conserve energy, building solar farms, from coal mines, bolstering the climate movement through various nonprofit boards and crafting policy at the state and municipal levels. I served as a state regulator and an elected town councilman. I have also spent 25 years in the field of corporate sustainability, trying to figure out how business might become a meaningful part of the climate solution. Over time, I came to understand that the ethic being applied the idea that free markets can solve societal problems and that even a monstrosity like climate change can be fixed without regulation was a ruse that I had bought into, realizing that fraud only late in the game. This year, Earths average temperature , briefly but ominously, to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average. Climate scientists have been telling us that of warming is the threshold we should not exceed, but at this point, more and more experts are saying it is . As the global climate summit in Dubai has unspooled, Ive read inexplicably posts from colleagues and friends, climate leaders I admire and total unknowns at COP28, the Conference of the Parties which Ive come to call the party at the end of the world. These Look, Ma! posts strike me as forced, naive at best, trending toward willful blindness and delusion. One breakthrough being lauded includes a by fossil fuel companies to better capture methane, a potent greenhouse gas we absolutely must contain. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and your Times account, or for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? . Want all of The Times? .