Sustain What?

When I was building my sustainability communication project at Columbia University, I was recruited to be an author of a chapter on “communicating risk for decision-making” in what would become the 2022 Global Assessment Report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. I couldn’t participate fully in the end (boring reasons) but gained a valuable view of the depth and breadth of expertise brought together by these periodic reports. Explore some of the results here:

The pandemic, which exploded as the writing process played out, vividly illustrated how all the communication advice in the world comes to naught if no one heeds it. But the world is still better with these efforts than it would be without them.

The 2025 report is being launched today. I hope you can spare at least a little time to listen to my conversation with Kamal Kishore, who leads that office and was previously the head of India’s National Disaster Management Authority of India. Back then he led the G20 Working Group on Disaster Risk Reduction and contributed to the development of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure.

Here’s the report description:

The Global Assessment Report (GAR) 2025: Resilience Pays: Financing and Investing for our Future highlights how smarter investment can reset the destructive cycle of disasters, debt, uninsurability and humanitarian need that threatens a climate-changed world.

Disaster risk is increasing as more frequent and intense hazard events, unsafe urbanisation, and ineffective development put more people and assets in harm's way. Disasters have profound macroeconomic impacts, with direct losses estimated at $202 billion. When cascading and ecosystem costs are taken into account, escalating disaster costs now surpass $2.3 trillion annually.

There is an urgent need to transform how disaster risk is addressed amid a rapidly changing climate. Risk is no longer a peripheral issue but a systemic challenge that affects financial stability, sustainability, and equity. By embedding risk reduction into core policy and investment decisions, it is possible to break the recurring cycle of shocks, losses and debt. With the right choices, resilience can become a foundation for long-term prosperity, enabling societies not only to withstand disasters but to thrive despite them.

I recorded the conversation above ahead of time because my wife and I (if travel chaos didn’t interfere) are currently in Athens on a rare international trip that doesn’t have my work at its core.

The United Nations is as flawed as any bureaucracy, but my experience made me ever more convinced it has a vital role to play as the world’s nations and communities grapple with grand challenges.

This 2022 Sustain What conversation on how to get news media to focus more on the conditions that turn a hard knock into a disaster couldn’t be more relevant:

When Avoiding Disaster is the Story

By their nature, news media focus on events, victims and villains more than the social systems that, through neglect or sometimes malice, lead to the calamitous losses we call disasters.

Is there a way to make preparedness and risk reduction the story? And is there a way to have that story read, and acted on?

In this special Sustain What webcast, veteran journalist Andy Revkin of the Columbia Climate School explores challenges and innovations with journalists and experts, several of them in Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction.The theme is "From Risk to Resilience: Towards Sustainable Development for All in a COVID-19 Transformed World." Here's the Global Platform site: https://globalplatform.undrr.orgMy guests were:Mavic Conde, an independent environmental journalist in the Philippines focused on solutions reporting.https://twitter.com/condemavicJoshua L. DeVincenzo, researcher and adjunct lecturer at the Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP)https://twitter.com/j_devincenzoNatalia Ilieva, Head of the office of the Secretary Genera of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Unionhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/natalia-ilieva-360a7324Roger Pulwarty, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory Senior Scientist and a Global Assessment Report author https://psl.noaa.gov/people/roger.pulwarty/

And here’s “disasterologist” Samantha Montano explaining why vulnerability imbalances created by corporate power, marginalization, racism and other social dynamics need to be recognized and acted on:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Whenever you need a break from the dueling pundits, have a listen to one of my Sunday Sanity shows.

For those who missed us live on Sunday, here’s an audio and video antidote for Trump’s lock on our brains - a conversation, poetry reading and picking party with a couple of remarkably creative humans - the provocateur poet Andrei Codrescu, who you may have heard as a frequent NPR commentator in decades past, and masterful bluegrass and trad musician John McEuen, best known for his 50 years in the legendary Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and for helping fellow high schooler Steve Martin learn banjo. There’s more context and content on each guest here.

Codrescu did discuss the happy news from his home country, Romania, summarized well in this Reuters report:

Romania's centrist Bucharest mayor, Nicusor Dan, won the country's presidential election on Sunday in a shock upset over a hard-right, nationalist rival who had pledged to put Romania on a path inspired by U.S. President Donald Trump's politics.

More here from Bluesky:

But we mainly explored each man’s life journey - with the 1960s a keystone moment for both - and fit in a few songs from McEuen and yours truly. I love McEuen’s version of “Old Rivers” (a person), from his latest album, The Newsman:

The full fidelity album version is on YouTube here.

I tossed in one of my recent songs, “Nibbling Ducks” - about how “those pesky chores, piling up, make my brain explode” (YouTube version).

Three flavors of autocracy

Codrescu reflected on living in three different times and flavors of authoritarian government, from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in 1967 to the National Guard crackdown on Detroit riots as he arrived there after fleeing Romania to Trump 2.0. Here’s a snippet but do enjoy and SHARE, the full episode.

Please consider chipping in to support my Sustain What project if you can afford it amid all the paywalls.

I get the paywall pain issue and even wrote about it here a few years ago.

Update June 3 | In another demonstration of the Trump administration’s reckless and damaging whiplash approach to funding of vital programs, the initial freeze on this vital conduit for weather data has been reversed. But note that the Unidata blog post below includes this line about sustained threats to funding:

This positive development allows us to end the current furlough of our staff and resume our operations. While we are grateful to receive our next increment of funding, we are mindful of the challenges that lie ahead with our continued funding given the administration’s proposed FY26 budget that cuts NSF’s budget by over fifty percent.

Original May 9 post | The effect of Trump’s initial blitzkrieg assault on science is like a multi-armed monster eating away at budgets, agency staff, technical systems and the spirits of thousands of scientists and other staff who support them - and citizens who rely on the innovations that flow from research, and students pondering careers in everything from meteorology to medicine.

And Trump loves it when concerned people like me or you get fixated on the potency of his impact. But I have to set aside my personal frustration with the troll of all trolls and convey what’s going on nonetheless.

This post is focused on just one of today’s mini disasters - the suspension of Unidata, a portal and network for realtime data sharing that you’ve likely never heard about but that matters enormously.

Amid the paywalls, it’s hard to chip in one more time, but for those who like what I’m doing and can afford it, please consider a donation.

For instance, Unidata efforts underpin the capacity for you to track live weather radar on your smartphone. That’s just one of the insights I gleaned from a brief pop-up conversation I just had with Jim Steenburgh, a University of Utah atmospheric sciences professor who’s been a user of such data for decades:

He also gave me permission to repost a piece he just published on the Wasatch Weather Weenies blog on the significance of this development:

NSF Cuts Shutter NSF Unidata

There's an organization you may have never heard of, but if you are a user of weather data and graphics on the web, they have almost certainly contributed to the cyberinfrastructure that made it possible.

Their name is NSF Unidata, or just "Unidata" for short.

Unidata developed organically in the 1980s when Universities has a pressing need to access weather data in real time, but couldn't. The Internet at the time was nascent and there was essentially no hardware and software systems capable of delivering, processing, and analyzing weather data. In 1983, a workshop at the University of Wisconsin involving about 80 US atmospheric sciences programs coined the name "unidata" and recommended that it be developed to provide:

* Access to current and archived weather data, including satellite imagery and forecasts.

* Support interactive computer capabilities at universities.

* Communications capabilities between universities, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and NASA.

These are things that we take for granted today, but would not have happened without Unidata. Amongst the products they developed are the Local Data Manager (LDM) which acquires and shares data between providers and users like the National Weather Service, NASA, and universities; netCDF (Network Common Data Form) which is a file format for storing self-described, multidimensional scientific data; and metpy which is a collection of python tools for reading and processing weather data. They have been transformative for the atmospheric and related sciences, with benefits not only for universities, but also the private and academic sectors and across the world.

I have benefited and been actively involved with Unidata throughout my career, including volunteer service on their Users and Strategic Advisory (formerly Policy) Committees. Last year I gave a short virtual talk on Unidata's history that provides some examples of the various ways that Unidata has benefited my career and the atmospheric and related sciences as a whole (apologies that the initial part of the talk is cutoff in the video below).

On 30 April, the National Science Foundation (NSF) froze funding for Unidata, with instructions to stop all funded actions until further notice. Due to this freeze, most staff in the Unidata program center are being furloughed effective today. The impacts on are fully summarized below.

This is yet another example of the damage being done to the US scientific enterprise by the Trump Administration. Unidata is an example of an organization that has widespread support from the University community because it develops and provides essential scientific services for research and education in the atmospheric and related sciences. The radar feeds that you take for granted today on your smart phone were first developed by the Unidata CRAFT product. The distribution of model forecasts that you can access today was first developed by the Unidata CONDUIT project. And a lot of the graphics that you see on the web rely on Unidata MetPy and visualization software.

These disruptions of the scientific enterprise are pure insanity. The halting of funding to Unidata will stymie scientific advancement, slow educational innovation, and limit classroom experiences.

Here’s Alan Gerard’s Balanced Weather post:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s the video and podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with two Maine-based educators and a superstar student taking on tough problems in their communities that have links to the wider world. Learn all the background in my “curtain raiser” post:

We were joined for a bit by Radhika Iyengar, a colleague of mine during my time at Columbia University. She’s working on an online course with Jeff Sachs on the Ages of Globalization.

There were wonderful comment contributions and questions from viewers around the Web, particularly this one from John Eppler on Facebook:

Thank you Paul von Zielbauer, Eric David Bosne, Anita Prentice, Mike Carroll, and many others for tuning into the live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.

And please consider joining the small, but wonderful, cohort of Sustain What subscribers who contribute financially.

I know the meshwork of paywalls on the Web is becoming a big headache for most of us - something I wrote about long ago here:

Here’s the curtain raiser post with all the relevant links related to Jon Allsop’s new book, What is Journalism For?, and Karen Bordeleau’s New Bedford Light newsroom, which made national waves with its vivid coverage of an atrocious abuse of force by immigration officers in New Bedford several days ago.

Here are two illuminating moments:

Jon Allsop on how an “emergency mode” for journalism facing the autocratic attacks from President Trump is out of date now that he’s settled into the White House:

A look at the New Bedford Light coverage of the intentionally terrifying immigration policies and practices under Trump:

Amid all the paywalls, it’d be great if a few more of you can consider becoming apaid supporter of Sustain What.

Thank you, Eric David Bosne, Anita Prentice, Mike Carroll, Paul von Zielbauer, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This is my first stab at a Substack Live video - done by adding Substack to my Streamyard livestream tool. Here’s the curtain-raiser post with lots of context:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s the podcast post of my virtual Sustain What meetup with a batch of folks out in the Hands Off protests against the Trump and Musk approach to “governing.” I was also joined by a longtime reader, Josette, from New Hampshire, who used to work in telecommunications at Perkins Coie, one of the law firms that Trump has attacked. We discussed this bit of good news from Friday (here from Reuters):

More than 500 law firms have signed a court brief denouncing Donald Trump's targeting of Perkins Coie and other firms, expressing alarm over the Republican president's intensifying crackdown on the legal profession.

As I noted in my curtain raiser yesterday, protest is vital, but so is wider resistance to such a power grab - in corporate, legal and other arenas. Read that piece here for more:

Josette also made an important point about keeping such rallies peaceful but, at the same time, predicting that Trump, sooner or later, will find an excuse to declare yet another national emergency to clamp down on dissent:

I'm just hoping today stays completely peaceful and there's no excuse. But at some point, I fully expect him to try to turn this into a military state, a police state, you know.

Have a listen and let me know your experiences if you went to a protest, or your thoughts on next steps if you didn’t.

To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My wife, Lisa Mechaley, took this photo at the Bangor demonstration.

“Elon Musk can declare, properly, every Starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.” - James Fallows

Here’s the webcast / podcast version of my Sustain What transportation conversation with longtime journalists James Fallows, David Kerley and Jim Motavalli. All the details and relevant links are in the “curtain raiser”:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fallows weighed in on just how extraordinarily safe U.S. commercial aviation has become because of a constant iterative push - particularly after crashes or close calls - to assess and improve. And how Trump and Musk’s blunt-instrument approach to policy and agency capacities will inevitably lead to tragedy.

As he explained, “Elon Musk can declare properly every starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.”

This wasn’t all a thrashing. Clearly the Federal Aviation Administration needs modernization, including examinations of the role of artificial intelligence and other technologies Elon Musk, in particular, has pushed. Kerley and Fallows both talked about the need to jump start the lagging NextGen project (Next Generation Air Transportation System).

Here’s the FAA NextGen site and a video explainer:

Here’s Kerley on this stalled program:

If you have more questions, post them in the comment thread and I’ll forward them to Fallows, Kerley and/or Motavalli.

I hope you heard (or now watch) my 2021 conversation with the Cambridge University climate researcher Mike Hulme and science and propaganda historian Naomi Oreskes on trust and mistrust in climate science.

The same goes for our 2023 conversation about his latest book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, which describes what he calls “climatism” - a tendency in climate-policy discussions to put CO2 reduction in the foreground no matter what the issue is. I’ve loaded it above and here we are on YouTube:

The “noble lie” in science-based policy campaigns

One fascinating issue he explores in the book is the age-old notion of the “noble lie.” Here’s that segment on its own:

If you really want to dive in, explore my New York Times articles drawing on his insights as far back as 2007.

But I also hope you’ll read this recent reflective essay he posted on his website - reposted here with permission. Hulme describes lessons that emerged through 40 years of climate scholarship and the evolution, and sometimes devolution, of public debate and related policies.

I agree wholeheartedly with much of his reasoning. Maybe it’s because we’ve both been at this long enough to see patterns others miss in the rush to the new, and long enough to recognize when our initial internal narratives around climate change and energy transitions no longer match the evidence.

Geopolitics, History and Climate Change: A Personal View

by Mike Hulme

“To think that we can draw some useful analogies from history dramatically underestimates the novelty and scale of the climate challenge.”[2]

“In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.”[3]

Starting in the early 1980s, I have spent my entire professional life studying climate change, as well as teaching, writing and speaking about it in universities, conferences, and public forums around the world—in 43 countries at the latest count. With such a professional and personal investment in the idea of climate change, it is not surprising that for a long period I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

Since first immersing myself in the topic in the 1980s, and subsequently being part of the scientific and public story of climate change in the 1990s and 2000s[4], I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.

But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. And I can also see why this was so. Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. The unyielding force of political realism—the pursuit of the changing and unpredictable interests of nations and great powers—means that the framing, significance, and responses to climate change need continually to adapt to shifting geopolitical realities. Except that too often they haven’t. Whilst the world’s climate has undoubtedly changed over these 40 years, the geopolitics, demography, and culture of the world has changed even more.[5] Too often the language, rhetoric, and campaigning around climate change remains wedded to a world that no longer exists.

***

The crucial period which shaped my own (mis-)reading of the prospective power and salience of climate change in the twenty-first century—and many other people’s mis-reading; I was not alone in this—was the ten years between 1985 and 1995, now more than a third of a century ago. This period marked the apogee of optimistic thinking about “a new world order”—in the words of George Bush senior—and about “the end of history”—in the words of Francis Fukuyama. It was marked by the rise of market globalization, the triumph of liberal democracy over state-sponsored communism, and the blithe promise of a world energy transition. In short, this optimism was fueled by the rise of globalism; thinking strategically about climate change was caught-up in this zeitgeist.

It was during these ten years that the dominant public narrative of climate change took shape, what Dan Sarewitz later called “the plan”.[6] “The plan”, according to Sarewitz, had two components: one, that scientific knowledge about climate change would lead to action by compelling a convergence of people’s worldviews around the need to take action; and, two, that this convergence of understanding would translate into a consequent convergence around what needs to be done. “The plan” appealed and gained pre-eminence among those who, like me, accepted Fukuyama’s unidirectional progressive view of history. In his famous 1989 essay, Fukuyama proposed that the post-Cold War era would see the replacement of “worldwide ideological struggle” with “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”[7] Climate change seemed to be ripe for such technological solutionism; and many believed it. I did too.

During those ten years, and leaking (just) into the twenty-first century, western values were casually presumed to be universal. And it was (just about) possible to imagine that the new harmony of nations might unite behind the primacy of America’s ‘benign’ world leadership. Forty years of Cold War had ended, 80 years of ideological struggle between liberal democracy and communism were over. It was, according to Fukuyama, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[8] In similar vein, Beck’s “cosmopolitan manifesto” was published in 1998, inserting ideas about world citizenship and ethical globalization firmly into the western mind.[9]

Yet this mood of optimistic globalism was dangerous. Writing retrospectively in 2023 about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political historian Timothy Garton-Ash explains the danger: “…deep down we somehow thought – or more accurately, felt – that we knew which way history was going. This is always a mistake and one that historians should be the last people on earth to make.”[10]

Around this time, the primacy of western science was reflected in the forging of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created by the UN in 1988, and first reporting in 1990, the IPCC gave the imprimatur of governmental backing to universal climate scientific knowledge as an authoritative guide to climate policy. The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated in 1992, and ratified in 1995. Subsequent annual Conferences of the Parties to the Convention would hammer out the new institutions, policies and measures around which the world would unite to tame the climate change threat. It was an echo of how scientists had discovered the ozone hole in 1985 and how negotiators had crafted the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and its subsequent amendments, to repair the damage. Climate science’s ascendant power was eventually to lead to the IPCC receiving a joint share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The new global science of climate change seemed to reign supreme.

Yet by 2007, the illusion under which I had been working—that geopolitics would bend to the force of concern over climate change—was already ending. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, ratified in 2004, had yielded next to nothing in terms of emissions reductions. Also running out of steam was Tony Blair’s campaign of international climate diplomacy conducted during the years 2003-2005, a self-conscious attempt to harness the moral high ground following the geopolitical disaster of the British Government’s support for the 2003 Iraq war. More significantly, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was the prelude to this disillusionment, and the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade Bill to pass in the US Senate in the summer of 2009 the main act. And the denouement came in December 2009 at COP15, billed as ‘the most important meeting in human history’. During a few days in a wintery Copenhagen, China’s growing political and economic muscle was firmly exercised, the impotence of the EU’s climate diplomacy revealed, and the limits of late twentieth century internationalism exposed.

The curtain finally came down on Sarewitz’s so-called “plan” during the (northern) 2009/10 winter of climate discontent. In November 2009, the western world was blind-sided by the Climategate controversy over leaked emails between corresponding scientists, and in the early months of 2010 its confidence in climate science further undermined by several challenges to the IPCC’s trust and credibility.

Meanwhile, the important geopolitical action was taking place elsewhere.

While we weren’t watching, something else was afoot at the turn of this decade. The forces of deglobalization were gathering, coinciding with climate’s ‘cultural turn’—the belated recognition that science is not enough to drive change, that science is never enough[11]—and the beginning of the west’s cultural solipsism and fragmentation. The (short-lived) Arab Spring of 2011 culminated in the decade-long Syrian Civil War and fractious ethnic nationalisms gathered pace, first in Russia and then in the USA, Brazil and parts of eastern Europe. And all the while, China’s belt-and-road initiative was beginning to tighten.

So how did the framing and campaigning around climate change respond in the early-mid-2010s to these compounding geopolitical trends? By doubling down on what had worked before. In other words, it responded by offering new science, more science, more scary science. Science was used to reframe what climate change seemed to demand of the world. Carbon budgets replaced emissions scenarios and the idea of ‘net-zero’ emissions was born[12]; theoretical world decarbonisation pathways to achieve net-zero were modelled to keep alive the illusion that a rapid global energy transition was possible[13]; weather attribution science was created as a new tool to drive home the imminence of climate change to a sceptical public; and the language of ‘loss and damage’ emerged to appease the concerns of the developing world. And, finally, in 2015, under the rhetorical weight of this new science, the old policy target of limiting warming to 2°C was reinvented in Paris as “1.5°C”, without a flicker of realization of the impossibility of what was implied by such a number.

It was believed—hoped?—that the world could, and the world would, bend to this demand. If climate change was ‘the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century’ then it needed to live up to this billing. Deadlines were set—“we have 12 years to limit climate catastrophe”[14]; language was re-set—from climate change to climate crisis[15], from global warming to global weirding; doomist narratives foregrounded[16], emergencies declared, extinction envisaged, and street protests unleashed. Each new realization of just how far away the world was from placing “stopping climate change” at the centre of today’s politics provoked a reaction: science was enrolled—through the IPCC’s 1.5°C Report in 2018; the rhetoric of tipping points was ramped-up; the young (through Greta Thunberg) and then the old (through female Swiss pensioners[17]) were used as cat’s paws to deliver chimerical feel-good victories; environmental lawyers co-opted Indigenous peoples to use the west’s legal system to try to deliver what the world’s nations stubbornly refused to deliver.

And all along, Putin laughed, China’s soft power—and not-so-soft power—grew, India dissented, the Emerging and Middle Income Countries arrived, African nations kept adding people to the planet. And the worldwide demand for energy continued to rise.

In Europe, too, the climate project began to sour. Between 2016 and 2020 the UK ‘brexited’ the EU collective, Russian gas flooded the continent before the Ukraine war in 2022 revealed the EU’s vulnerability to imperialist aggression, everywhere nativism seemed to flex new political muscles, and climate scepticism found new expressions: among farmers, motorists, and France’s gilet jaunes. Even then, some still held on to the old certainties that the fossil fuel industry represented the evil “eye of Sauron”, calling upon all well-meaning people in the world to join forces in a “final battle” to defeat the rapacious enemy.[18]

There was a brief flicker of hope in 2020/21 when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. But Pielke’s iron law of climate policy—’when environmental and economic objectives are placed into opposition with one another in public or political forums, the economic goals win out’—could not be broken.[19] Even a global pandemic could not subvert the inertia of the world’s energy pathway and the unyielding self-interest of world powers.

Climate campaigners and youth activists once again failed to grasp the nature of the problem. A fringe group of scientists—Scientists’ Rebellion—joined ever more extreme public protests, Just Stop Oil adopted ever more bizarre tactics, the UN Secretary-General offered ever more heated rhetoric about the world a-boiling[20], and the liberal media headed by The Guardian and New York Times amplified climate alarmism, eco-anxiety, chest-beating, and flight, meat and birth shaming. Taking their cue from David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 book, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, Netflix tried a new line in releasing the film‘Don’t Look Up’ in December 2021. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio this apocalyptic satire compares climate change to an asteroid locked in on destring planet Earth.

But climate change is not an asteroid heading for Earth. If it were, then maybe the megalomanic technology of solar geoengineering—currently being talked up in Washington, Tokyo and Singapore[21]—might, just might, be worth taking a punt. Neither is climate change the result of capitalism.[22] Thinking so, suggests Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, offers only “an apparently radical but ultimately reassuring story [which] underestimates the immensity of the climate challenge. Getting out of carbon will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism.”[23] Climate change is locked into state-sponsored oil extraction, Indian coal, Africa’s demography, China’s unwavering self-interest packaged in warm climate-sounding words, and the legitimate aspirations of half of the world’s population for the benefits of high-energy modernism. Eradicate capitalism and all these things would remain.

***

So this has been my 40-year journey with climate change, initially from idealist to pragmatist, and now from pragmatist to realist. It is not a particularly hopeful story-arc, but then why should I, or anyone else, ever think that climate change was going to offer one? There is no hidden hand—least of all the benign hand of science—guiding the world to a safe climate-landing. There is no happy ending; we stumble from one thing to the next. Again, why did I or anyone else think there would be? Francis Fukuyama was profoundly wrong in 1989: not only was history not ending in the 1990s, it had barely got started.

One has to go where one believes the truth lies. For me, initially this was the scientific truth of a warming world, to which much of my early research contributed, and the derivative belief that the world would fall into line, guided by the science of the IPCC and the enlightened diplomacy of the UNFCCC. This belief rested on a naïve rationalism, the sort recently expressed in a Nature editorial when claiming that “Science-based decision-making is what will ultimately help the world to resolve the crises it faces”.[24]

Now, 30 years later, it is the geopolitical truth that power and interests win out. Climate is not the only thing that is changing through our lifetimes, and perhaps not the most important thing. Technology, cultural values, the centres of political, economic and military power have all changed remarkably since I first started studying climate change 40 years ago; and the rules, cohesion and effectiveness of the international order that I assumed were eternal are being seriously called into question. I now see the need for a deeper reading of political realism and power, that goes beyond seeing science as a coercive force that trumps geopolitics, beyond appeals to a superficial cosmopolitanism. To use the language of Jason Maloy at Louisiana University, climate change is neither an emergency or a crisis; it is a political epic, “a process of collective human effort that features gradual progression through time, obscure problem origins, and anticlimactic outcomes.”[25]

The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.

© Mike Hulme, January 2025

This essay was inspired by Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic Books, 2009) and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Allen Lane, 2024).

[2] p.13 in: Fressoz,J-B. (2024) More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. London: Allen Lane.

[3] Advertising blurb for Toal,G. (2024) Oceans Rise, Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[4] Summarised, for example, in my 2013 book: Hulme,M. (2013) Exploring Climate Change Through Science and in Society: An Anthology of Mike Hulme’s Essays, Interviews and Speeches. Abingdon: Routledge.

[5] See Reich,R. (2022) Putin and Trump have convinced me: I was wrong about the 21st century. The Guardian, 13 March.

[6] Sarewitz,D. (2011) Does climate change knowledge really matter? WIREs Climate Change. 2(4): 475-481.

[7] p.18 in: Fukuyama,F. (1989) The End of History? The National Interest. 16(Summer): 3-18.

[8] Ibid. p.4

[9] Beck,U. (1998) The Cosmopolitan Manifesto. New Statesman. 20(4377): 28-30.

[10] pp.240-241in: Garton-Ash,T. (2023) Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. Vintage Books.

[11] Hulme,M. (2011) Meet the humanities. Nature Climate Change. 1(4): 177-179; also, Hulme,M. (2015) Editor’s introduction: the cultures of climate. pp.xxiii-xlviii in: Climates and Cultures: SAGE Library of the Environment. Hulme,M. (ed.), London: SAGE.

[12] Lahn,B. (2020) A history of the global carbon budget. WIREs Climate Change. 11(3): e636.

[13] Fressoz 2024, op. cit.

[14] Watts,J. (2018) We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN. The Guardian. 8 October.

[15] Zeldin-O’Neill,S. (2019) ‘It’s a crisis, not a change’: the six Guardian language changes on climate matters. The Guardian. 16 October.

[16] Wallace-Wells,D. (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Allen Lane.

[17] BBC (2024) European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction. 9 April.

[18] p.254 in: Mann,M. (2021) The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. New York: Public Affairs.

[19] Pielke,R.jr. (2010) The Climate Fix: Why Decades of Magical Thinking Have Not Solved Global Warming – and What To Do About It. New York: Basic Books.

[20] Gutierres,A. (2023) Hottest July ever signals ‘era of global boiling has arrived’ says UN chief. UN Global News. July 27.

[21] McLaren,D. and Corry,O. (2025) Solar geoengineering research faces geopolitical deadlock. Science. 387(2 January): 28-30.

[22] Klein,N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[23] p.8 in: Fressoz, 2024, op cit.

[24] Anon (2024) UN summits: one step forward, two steps back. Nature. 19/26 December. 636:521.

[25] Maloy,J.S. (2024) Beyond crisis and emergency: Climate change as a political epic. Ethics & International Affairs. 38(1): 103-125.

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here's today’s Sustain What discussion with two journalists from Global Press, an international newsroom supporting female reporters in the world’s most troubled regions. Global Press immediately began widespread reporting on the realtime impacts of the initial USAID freeze and persistent chaos around money flowing to public health and other vital programs from Nepal to Uganda. (I apologize for some audio echo but you can scan the rough transcript as well.)

The editor-in-chief, Krista Karch, and Nakisanze Segawa, reporter-in-residence in Kampala, Uganda, offered disturbing descriptions of specific perils created by the Trump administration’s aggressive moves.

“People are dying”

As Karch says, “The big thing is that people are dying. People are dying. You cannot emphasize that any more.”

And of course please read Global Press’s reporting. Here are some of the latest dispatches:

* Zimbabwe Braces for HIV Resurgence as US Aid Evaporates - Sex workers are the first to feel the effects, as mobile health clinics that offered condoms and preventative treatments disappear.

* The Trump Administration Is Gutting USAID. Nepali Infants Will Starve, Officials Warn - The US government's abrupt stop-work order halts a 72-million-dollar project designed to end malnutrition. It’s worth noting that much of the Global Press output is published in local languages as well, as here in नेपाली.

* Without USAID Support, Refugees in Uganda Lose Food, Job Training -

Uganda hosts 1.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers, the largest number of any African country. But without US funding, basic services like food distribution are likely to end.

* Ebola Breaks Out in Uganda as US Halts Foreign Aid - At least one person has died in the country's latest outbreak. US aid has been key to containing previous outbreaks. How will Uganda fare without it?

Some critical comments and questions came in during the live show complaining that African nations should be more self sufficient and wean themselves from colonial support systems. Karch and Segawa said Global Press has stories in the works on that issue, which can also be seen percolating on social media in Uganada.

Finally we discussed the unique training and support system Global Press provides to empower and protect female journalists amid challenges that are intense even in the world’s wealthiest countries.

Segawa said:

Knowing Global Press has my back…gives me the courage to go to places that would rather be deemed dangerous for a female journalist to go to and talk to people and see what's happening and witness events and report about that.

Here’s yesterday’s “curtain raiser” post with more links and details:

To sustain Sustain What, consider becoming a paid subscriber, which keeps this content open for those who can’t afford to pay.