While America now fully abandons climate action, the world races ahead—and watches in dismay. A look at the cost of US denial and how good things happening without us.

Mads Christensen, the executive director of Greenpeace International, has spent three decades on the front lines of environmental activism. In my conversation with him on a recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, he brings a perspective that cuts against the prevailing American narrative of climate despair.

He explains that while climate change vanishes from American political discourse, something remarkable is happening in the rest of the world: Beijing, a city once choked by smog, has transformed into an electric metropolis with blue skies. Pakistan has gone from minimal renewable energy to over 25% in just five years. The UK just became the largest economy to end new oil and gas exploration. And in the real world, the intellectual argument about the reality and the existential danger of climate change has been won.

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