Bipartisan Senate climate caucus grows by six members

By Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill, Nov. 6, 2019

The Senate’s bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus is already growing with the addition of six new members announced on Wednesday.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Angus King (I-Maine), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) will join the caucus formed by Sens. Christopher Coons (D-Del.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) last month.

“I believe climate change is real. I also believe that we as Americans have the ability to come up with climate change solutions that can benefit our economy and our way of life,” Graham said in a statement. “The United States has long been a leader in innovation. Addressing climate change is an opportunity to put our knowledge and can-do spirit to work to protect the environment for our benefit today and for future generations.”

The group said members want to craft “legislation that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions using market-based approaches that are durable, equitable, and supportive of the American economy.”

Even as consensus grows among political leaders on the realities of climate change, Coons and Braun said they hope to remove divisiveness from what remains a controversial issue in Congress.

“Our caucus seeks to take the politics out of this important issue. Instead, members will commit to an honest dialogue, through which we can develop solutions that solidify American environmental leadership, promote American workers, and make meaningful progress on protecting our environment,” the duo wrote in an op-ed in The Hill.

The eight-member group has already had its first meeting, joining CEOs on Tuesday to discuss federal climate policy. They are also slated to make an appearance on "CBS This Morning" on Thursday. 

A companion caucus, the House Climate Solutions Caucus, is led by Reps. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) and Francis Rooney (R-Fla.).

Graham was joined by Murkowski when he announced the formation of the Republican Roosevelt Conservation Caucus in July. 

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/469242-bipartisan-senate-climate-caucus-grows-by-six-members

More than 11,000 scientists from around the world declare a ‘climate emergency’

Analysis outlines six major steps that ‘must’ be taken to address the situation.

By Andrew Freedman, Washington Post, Nov. 5, 2019

A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency,” and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it.

The analysis is a stark departure from recent scientific assessments of global warming, such as those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in that it does not couch its conclusions in the language of uncertainties, and it does prescribe policies.

The study, called the “World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency,” marks the first time a large group of scientists has formally come out in favor of labeling climate change an “emergency,” which the study notes is caused by many human trends that are together increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The report, published Tuesday in the journal Bioscience, was spearheaded by the ecologists Bill Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon State University, along with William Moomaw, a Tufts University climate scientist, and researchers in Australia and South Africa.

The paper clearly lays out the huge challenge of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament,” the study states.

The paper bases its conclusions on a set of easy-to-understand indicators that show the human influence on climate, such as 40 years of greenhouse gas emissions, economic trends, population growth rates, per capita meat production, and global tree cover loss, as well as consequences, such as global temperature trends and ocean heat content.

The results are charts that are, at least compared with the climate graphics presented by the IPCC, surprisingly simple, and that help reveal the troubling direction the world is headed.

The study also departs from other major climate assessments in that it directly addresses the politically sensitive subject of population growth. The study notes that the global decline in fertility rates has “substantially slowed” during the past 20 years, and calls for “bold and drastic” changes in economic growth and population policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Such measures would include policies that strengthen human rights, especially for women and girls, and make family-planning services “available to all people,” the paper says.

On energy, the report calls for the world to “implement massive energy efficiency and conservation practices” and cut out fossil fuels in favor of renewable sources of energy, a trend it notes is not happening fast enough. It also calls for remaining fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, to remain in the ground, never to be burned to generate energy, a key goal for many climate activists.

Maria Abate, a signatory of the scientists’ warning and a biology professor at Simmons College in Boston, says she hopes the paper will raise awareness. “Like other organisms we are not adapted to recognize far-reaching environmental threats beyond our immediate surroundings,” she said via email. “The reported vital signs of our global activity and climate responses give us a tangible, evidence-based report card that I hope will help our culture to develop a broader awareness more quickly to slow this climate crisis.”

Other items on the study’s list of policy priorities include quickly cutting emissions of short-lived climate pollutants, such as soot and methane, which could slow short-term warming. The study also calls for a shift to eating mostly plant-based foods and instituting agricultural practices that increase the amount of carbon the soil absorbs. On the economy, the study states that improving long-term sustainability and reducing inequality should be prioritized over growing wealth, as measured using gross domestic product. The authors also advocate for policies that would curtail biodiversity loss and the destruction of forests, and they recommend prioritizing the preservation of intact forests that store carbon along with other lands that can rapidly bury carbon, thereby reducing global warming.

“This is a document that establishes a clear record of the broad consensus among most scientists active at this point in history that the climate crisis is real, and is a major, even existential, threat to human societies, human well-being, and biodiversity,” said Jesse Bellemare, an associate professor of biology at Smith College who is a signatory of the study’s emergency declaration.

He said via email that the presence of so many biologists and ecologists on the list of signatories may reflect the fact that they are observing so many changes from an amount of climate change much smaller than what is projected for the future.

Ripple, of Oregon State, is no stranger to organizing scientific calls to action, having founded the Alliance of World Scientists and organized scientists’ “Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice” in 2017, which was also published in Bioscience and focused on the urgent need to solve a broad array of environmental problems including climate change and biodiversity loss.

Thousands of scientists issue bleak ‘second notice’ to humanity

“We’re asking for a transformative change for humanity,” Ripple said in an interview. Many of the signatories to the warning do not list themselves as climate scientists but, instead, as biologists, ecologists and other science specialists. Ripple says that is intentional, as the authors sought to assemble the broadest support possible.

“The situation we’re in today with climate change,” he says, “shows that this is an issue that needs to move beyond climate scientists only.”

Moomaw says the paper comes from researchers who are seeing the consequences of a rapidly changing planet, and is in part “a statement of frustration on the part of many in the scientific community.”

“Scientists, and in particular those that are studying what is happening in a changed climate, have become the most alarmed at how rapidly these changes are taking place and the urgency of needing to take far more drastic action,” Moomaw said.

The term “climate emergency” has been championed by climate activists and pro-climate action politicians seeking to add a sense of urgency to the way we respond to what is a long-term problem. The Climate Mobilization, an advocacy group, is seeking to have governments in the United States and elsewhere declare a climate emergency and enact response measures commensurate with such a declaration.

New York’s City Council has declared a climate emergency, as has San Francisco. European cities have also taken this step. Bills labeling global warming as an emergency are pending in both the House and the Senate, endorsed by prominent liberals including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

The youth climate movement, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has been leading the charge to ratchet up the language used in describing global warming.

To date, scientists have been reluctant to use such language. However, this study may change that.

Phil Duffy, a climate researcher and president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who added his name to the paper Monday, said he finds the term fitting, considering the scale of the problem and lack of action so far.

“The term ‘climate emergency’ … I must say, I find it refreshing, really, because you know, I get so impatient with the scientists who just are always just waffling and mumbling about uncertainty, blah, blah, blah, and this certainly is, you know, is much bolder than that,” he said. “I think it’s right to do that.”

Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think

Economists greatly underestimate the price tag on harsher weather and higher seas. Why is that?

By Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern

Op-Ed, New York Times, Oct. 23, 2019

For some time now it has been clear that the effects of climate change are appearing faster than scientists anticipated. Now it turns out that there is another form of underestimation as bad or worse than the scientific one: the underestimating by economists of the costs.

The result of this failure by economists is that world leaders understand neither the magnitude of the risks to lives and livelihoods, nor the urgency of action. How and why this has occurred is explained in a recent report by scientists and economists at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

One reason is obvious: Since climate scientists have been underestimating the rate of climate change and the severity of its effects, then economists will necessarily underestimate their costs.

But it’s worse than that. A set of assumptions and practices in economics has led economists both to underestimate the economic impact of many climate risks and to miss some of them entirely. That is a problem because, as the report notes, these “missing risks” could have “drastic and potentially catastrophic impacts on citizens, communities and companies.”

One problem involves the nature of risk in a climate-altered world. Right now, carbon dioxide is at its highest concentration in the atmosphere in three million years (and still climbing). The last time levels were this high, the world was about five degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea level 32 to 65 feet higher. Humans have no experience weathering sustained conditions of this type.

Typically, our estimates of the value or cost of something, whether it is a pair of shoes, a loaf of bread or the impact of a hurricane, are based on experience. Statisticians call this “stationarity.” But when conditions change so much that experience is no longer a reliable guide to the future — when stationarity no longer applies — then estimates become more and more uncertain.

Hydrologists have recognized for some time that climate change has undermined stationarity in water management — indeed, they have declared that stationarity is dead. But economists have by and large not recognized that this applies to climate effects across the board. They approach climate damages as minor perturbations around an underlying path of economic growth, and take little account of the fundamental destruction that we might be facing because it is so outside humanity’s experience.

A second difficulty involves parameters that scientists do not feel they can adequately quantify, like the value of biodiversity or the costs of ocean acidification. Research shows that when scientists lack good data for a variable, even if they know it to be salient, they are loath to assign a value out of a fear that they would be “making it up.”

Therefore, in many cases, they simply omit it from the model, assessment or discussion. In economic assessments of climate change, some of the largest factors, like thresholds in the climate system, when a tiny change could tip the system catastrophically, and possible limits to the human capacity to adapt, are omitted for this reason. In effect, economists have assigned them a value of zero, when the risks are decidedly not. One example from the report: The melting of Himalayan glaciers and snow will both flood and profoundly affect the water supply of communities in which hundreds of millions of people live, yet this is absent from most economic assessments.

A third and terrifying problem involves cascading effects. One reason the harms of climate change are hard to fathom is that they will not occur in isolation, but will reinforce one another in damaging ways. In some cases, they may produce a sequence of serious, and perhaps irreversible, damage.

For example, a sudden rapid loss of Greenland or West Antarctic land ice could lead to much higher sea levels and storm surges, which would contaminate water supplies, destroy coastal cities, force out their residents, and cause turmoil and conflict.

Another example: increased heat decreases food production, which leads to widespread malnutrition, which diminishes the capacity of people to withstand heat and disease and makes it effectively impossible for them to adapt to climate change. Sustained extreme heat may also decrease industrial productivity, bringing about economic depressions.

In a worst-case scenario, climate impacts could set off a feedback loop in which climate change leads to economic losses, which lead to social and political disruption, which undermines both democracy and our capacity to prevent further climate damage. These sorts of cascading effects are rarely captured in economic models of climate impacts. And this set of known omissions does not, of course, include additional risks that we may have failed to have identified.

The urgency and potential irreversibility of climate effects mean we cannot wait for the results of research to deepen our understanding and reduce the uncertainty about these risks. This is particularly so because the study suggests that if we are missing something in our assessments, it is likely something that makes the problem worse.

This is yet another reason it’s urgent to pursue a new, greener economic path for growth and development. If we do that, a happy ending is still possible. But if we wait to be more certain, the only certainty is that we will regret it.

Dr. Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard. Professor Stern is chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

The world needs a massive carbon tax in just 10 years to limit climate change, IMF says

The international organization suggests a cost of $75 per ton by 2030.

By Chris Mooney and Andrew Freedman, The Washington Post, Oct. 10, 2019

A global agreement to make fossil fuel burning more expensive is urgent and the most efficient way of fighting climate change, an International Monetary Fund study found on Thursday.

The group found that a global tax of $75 per ton by the year 2030 could limit the planet’s warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or roughly double what it is now. That would greatly increase the price of fossil-fuel-based energy — especially from the burning of coal — but the economic disruption could be offset by routing the money raised straight back to citizens.

“If you compare the average level of the carbon tax today, which is $2 [a ton], to where we need to be, it’s a quantum leap,” said Paolo Mauro, deputy director of the fiscal affairs department at the IMF.

The IMF report comes out as financial institutions increasingly grapple with the risks associated with climate change, including damage from sea-level rise, extreme weather events and billions in fossil fuel reserves that might be in excess of what can be burned while also limiting warming. The Federal Reserve, for example, is taking a closer look at how climate change may pose a risk to economic stability.

In the United States, a $75 tax would cut emissions by nearly 30 percent but would cause on average a 53 percent increase in electricity costs and a 20 percent rise for gasoline at projected 2030 prices, the analysis in the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor found.

But it would also generate revenue equivalent to 1 percent of gross domestic product, an enormous amount of money that could be redistributed and, if spread equally, would end up being a fiscally progressive policy, rather than one disproportionately targeting the poor.

The impact of a $75-per-ton tax would also hit countries differently depending on burning or exporting coal, which produces the most carbon emissions per unit of energy generated when it is burned.

In developing nations such as China, India and South Africa, a $75 carbon tax reduces emissions even more — by as much as 45 percent — and generates proportionately more revenue, as high as 3.5 percent of GDP in South Africa’s case, the IMF found.

The idea of making it expensive to produce greenhouse gas emissions is hardly new, and has been widely embraced by economists despite the immense political difficulties involved in imposing such taxes.

“No environmental economist should disagree with the main argument of the paper: Carbon pricing is the single most powerful tool we have for reducing CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, and our current set of policies leaves us nowhere close to meeting our climate goals,” said Marc Hafstead, a climate policy expert with Resources for the Future.

But several experts said that the IMF stance was important even as they noted that the carbon price may need to be a lot higher, rendering an already gigantic lift even more difficult.

Kenneth Gillingham, an economics professor at Yale University who worked on environmental issues during a stint as part of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the IMF’s position added to the urgency recent scientific and economic assessments had shown in discussing how to tackle the climate problem.

“From my perspective this is an exciting change in that they’re thinking more deeply than they had previously,” he said.

But Gillingham said a $75 per ton carbon tax may actually be too low to hold climate change to 2 degrees, noting that he had expected the figure to be closer to $100 per ton, given the world’s high emissions path.

Gernot Wagner, who studies climate policy at New York University, agreed. He co-wrote a paper published Monday arguing that a carbon price should start high and gradually be reduced to take into account the costs of future damage from global warming.

“If one takes climate risk and uncertainty seriously, the numbers rise much higher still,” Wagner said in an email.

Most economists and policymakers have designed carbon tax policies that start relatively low and ramp up quickly over time. Proponents say it would minimize economic hardship for consumers and companies for their past choices while changing future decisions such as purchases of polluting equipment or automobiles.

The Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist William D. Nordhaus has argued that a carbon tax of $300 per ton or even higher might be required.

“Their estimate is, in my view, if anything on the low side of what is needed” but on the high side compared with policies already being implemented in some countries, Nordhaus said in an email.

Moreover, the latest science suggests the world will sustain massive damage, such as the loss of nearly all coral reefs, even if it holds warming to, or just under, 2 degrees Celsius. To keep warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius, the carbon tax would have to be even higher, the IMF’s Mauro noted, though he said he is not sure how high because the group did not do that analysis.

“The climate crisis is so dire, and public/popular determination to attack it is suddenly so strong and unquenchable, that even $75/ton by 2030 seems far too moderate a target,” wrote Charles Komanoff, director of the Carbon Tax Center, in an emailed response to the IMF study.

The IMF report considers not just economic policy options, but the political feasibility of these proposals as well, including how they might affect different segments of society and how to make them more politically palatable, such as by redirecting the revenue back to the populace through tax cuts or direct dividend payments.

It shows that in the Group of 20 largest economies, the tax would raise energy costs by an average of 43 percent for electricity and 14 percent for gasoline in the countries considered.

This reflects the growing recognition that policies that impose financial burdens that fall hardest on a particular segment of society could trigger unintended blowback. France’s tax hike on gasoline and diesel, for example, helped spur the violent “yellow vest” protests this year.

Noah Kaufman, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said the IMF joins “the chorus of organizations, experts and even grass-roots groups of people” calling for more aggressive climate action.

“The question is how to spur action, and a group like the IMF has a role to play in making that happen,” he said.

How to Cut Emissions Without Wrecking the Economy

Op-ed by Christopher Crane and Ted Halstead

The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 23, 2019

In a major shift, the Business Roundtable recently embraced the idea that the purpose of a corporation should go beyond serving shareholders and include responsibility to the environment and the broader community. On no issue is this more true than climate policy—which affects all sectors of society, but where market prices do not internalize environmental costs. So what exactly would a pro-business, pro-environment and pro-consumer climate solution look like?

To answer this question, the broadest climate coalition in U.S. history has met in private over the past two years. Brought together by the Climate Leadership Council, of which Exelon is a founding member, this coalition includes corporate sector leaders from a range of industries, environmental nonprofits, economists and opinion leaders from across the political spectrum. The outcome of this two-year dialogue is a breakthrough plan to cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2035—while benefiting American businesses, workers and consumers.

Our plan is based on the concept of carbon dividends: a gradually rising fee on all carbon emissions, whose proceeds are returned directly to the American people through quarterly dividend checks. It also calls for significantly simplifying carbon regulations and a border carbon adjustment to protect and promote the competitiveness of American firms. This general framework was first introduced in these pages in 2017 by former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III.

It’s one thing to build an odd-bedfellow coalition around broad principles, quite another to refine the details of an actionable plan. That we have now done. The Council’s Bipartisan Roadmap will be released in the coming months, but we can preview here three of its salient features.

The first is our plan’s environmental ambition. It calls for a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton and increasing annually at 5% above inflation. According to modeling by the research group Resources for the Future, if implemented in 2021 the plan would achieve 50% U.S. CO2 reduction by 2035, as compared with 2005 levels. It would also exceed the 2025 U.S. commitment under the Paris agreement by a wide margin.

Our plan, unlike many of the aspirational proposals floating around these days, is grounded in concrete modeling. It’s also backed up by an Emissions Assurance Mechanism, which specifies that the carbon fee will temporarily increase faster if agreed-upon emissions reduction targets are not achieved.

Second, the vast majority of Americans will be economic winners under our plan. According to the U.S. Treasury, 70% of American families—including the most vulnerable—would come out ahead, receiving more in carbon dividends than they pay in increased energy costs. A family of four would receive approximately $2,000 a year in carbon dividends, an amount that will grow over time as the carbon fee increases. And the more you shrink your carbon footprint, the more you come out ahead. This aligns—for the first time—the economic interests of American families with climate progress.

Third, our plan’s environmental and social ambition is matched by equally strong pro-business and pro-competitiveness provisions.

For starters, our bipartisan plan is revenue-neutral and won’t increase the size of the federal government. Unlike many climate plans, which require large increases in taxes, deficits or both, ours will “finance” the transition to a low-carbon future by incentivizing individual and corporate behavior and by leveraging the extensive resources of the private sector. It will also spur American innovation and let the market decide on the best low-carbon technologies and energy sources.

Enacting the most ambitious carbon price of any leading emitting nation will render many current and future carbon regulations unnecessary. In the majority of cases where a carbon fee offers a more cost-effective solution, the fee will replace regulations. For example, all current and future federal stationary-sources carbon regulations will be displaced or pre-empted. This offers businesses the predictability and flexibility they need to innovate and make long-term investments in a low-carbon future.

No doubt this regulatory streamlining will be controversial in some circles. But the decisive metric in weighing climate policy alternatives should be their ability to reduce emissions. On this score, a meaningful and rising price on carbon easily outperforms regulation-heavy alternatives. For example: If all Obama -era climate regulations had remained in place, they would have reduced U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions only by approximately 18% by 2025, falling well short of Paris commitments. Our plan, by contrast, would achieve 32% reductions by 2025.

Finally, border adjustments for the carbon content of imports and exports will enhance the competitiveness of American firms that are more energy-efficient than their foreign competitors, reversing today’s trade incentives, which effectively subsidize dirtier manufacturing overseas. This will put America in the driver’s seat of global climate policy and encourage other top emitters—such as China and India—to adopt carbon pricing of their own.

Our carbon-dividends plan demonstrates that economic dynamism, environmental stewardship and social well-being are mutually compatible and need not be traded off against one another. It should serve as the basis for a much-needed bipartisan climate breakthrough.

Mr. Crane is president and CEO of Exelon, a provider of emissions-free energy. Mr. Halstead is chairman and CEO of the Climate Leadership Council.

Al Gore: The Climate Crisis Is the Battle of Our Time, and We Can Win

Op-Ed by Al Gore, The New York Times, Sept. 20, 2019

Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could.

The destructive impacts of the climate crisis are now following the trajectory of that economics maxim as horrors long predicted by scientists are becoming realities.

More destructive Category 5 hurricanes are developing, monster fires ignite and burn on every continent but Antarctica, ice is melting in large amounts there and in Greenland, and accelerating sea-level rise now threatens low-lying cities and island nations.

Tropical diseases are spreading to higher latitudes. Cities face drinking-water shortages. The ocean is becoming warmer and more acidic, destroying coral reefs and endangering fish populations that provide vital protein consumed by about a billion people.

Worsening droughts and biblical deluges are reducing food production and displacing millions of people. Record-high temperatures threaten to render areas of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, North Africa and South Asia uninhabitable. Growing migrations of climate refugees are destabilizing nations. A sixth great extinction could extinguish half the species on earth.

Finally people are recognizing that the climate is changing, and the consequences are worsening much faster than most thought was possible. A record 72 percent of Americans polled say that the weather is growing more extreme. And yet every day we still emit more than 140 million tons of global warming pollution worldwide into the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I often echo the point made by the climate scientist James Hansen: The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases — some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years — is now trapping as much extra energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs would release every 24 hours.

This is the crisis we face.

Now we need to ask ourselves: Are we really helpless and unwilling to respond to the gravest threat faced by civilization? Is it time, as some have begun to counsel, to despair, surrender and focus on “adapting” to the progressive loss of the conditions that have supported the flourishing of humanity? Are we really moral cowards, easily manipulated into lethargic complacency by the huge continuing effort to deceive us into ignoring what we see with our own eyes?

More damage and losses are inevitable, no matter what we do, because carbon dioxide remains for so long in the atmosphere. So we will have to do our best to adapt to unwelcome changes. But we still retain the ability to avoid truly catastrophic, civilization-ending consequences if we act quickly.

This is our generation’s life-or-death challenge. It is Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and Sept. 11. At moments of such crisis, the United States and the world have to be mobilized, and before we can be mobilized, we have to be inspired to believe the battle can be won. Is it really too much to ask now that politicians summon the courage to do what most all of them already know is necessary?

We have the technology we need. That economic maxim about slow-fast phenomena, first articulated by the M.I.T. economist Rudiger Dornbusch and known as Dornbusch’s Law, also explains the tsunami of technological and economic change that has given us tools to sharply reduce global warming pollution much faster than we thought was possible only a short time ago. For example, according to the research group Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as recently as 2014 — a year before the Paris climate agreement was reached — electricity from solar and wind was cheaper than new coal and gas plants in probably 1 percent of the world. Today, only five years later, solar and wind provide the cheapest sources of new electricity in two-thirds of the world. Within five more years, these sources are expected to provide the cheapest new electricity in the entire world. And in 10 years, solar and wind electricity will be cheaper nearly everywhere than the electricity that existing fossil fuel plants will be able to provide.

This transition is already unfolding in the largest economies. Consider the progress made by the world’s top four emitters of greenhouse gases. Last year, solar and wind represented 88 percent of the new electricity capacity installed in the 28 nations of the European Union, 65 percent in India, 53 percent in China and 49 percent in the United States.

This year, several American utilities have announced plans to close existing natural gas and coal generating plants — some with decades of useful life remaining — to replace their output with cheaper electricity from wind and solar farms connected to ever-cheaper battery storage. As the chief executive of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company said recently, “The surprise was how dramatically the renewables and storage proposals beat natural gas.” He added, “I couldn’t have predicted this five years ago.”

Today, the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is solar installer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it has exceeded average job growth sixfold in the last five years. The second-fastest growing job: wind turbine service technician.

In Australia, a high-tech entrepreneur, Mike Cannon-Brookes, is reportedly planning to sell renewable electricity generated in the Northern Territories to South Asian cities over a long-distance undersea cable. Globally, close to 200 of the world’s largest companies have announced commitments to use 100 percent renewable energy, and several have already reached that goal. A growing number of cities, states and provinces have pledged to do the same.

The number of electric vehicles on the road has increased by 450 percent in the past four years, and several automobile manufacturers are shifting research and development spending away from internal combustion vehicles, because the cost-reduction curve for E.V.s is expected to soon drop the cost of the vehicle well below comparable gasoline and diesel models’. Over half of all buses in the world will be electric within the next five years, a majority in China, according to some market experts. At least 16 nations have set targets to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles.

More broadly, the evidence now indicates that we are in the early stages of a sustainability revolution that will achieve the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the digital revolution, made possible by new digital tools. To pick one example, Google has reduced the amount of electricity required to cool its enormous server farms by 40 percent using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. No new hardware was required. Sustainable alternatives to existing methods of industrial production are being pursued by more and more companies.

A farmer-led regenerative agriculture revolution that is also underway avoids plowing and focuses on building soil health by sequestering carbon dioxide in the ground, making the land more fertile. The farmers are using rotational grazing and planting trees and diverse cover crops to enrich soil and protect against erosion.

And so far, the best available technology for pulling carbon dioxide from the air is something called a tree. That’s why many nations are starting ambitious tree planting efforts. Ethiopia recently reported planting 353 million trees in 12 hours, nearly double the goal of 200 million. Scientists calculate that we have enough available land worldwide to plant between one trillion and one and a half trillion trees. To protect our vast but dwindling forests, new satellites and digital tools can now monitor deforestation virtually tree by tree, so corporations will know if the products they buy were grown on razed or burned forestland.

Yet for all this promise, here is another hard truth: All of these efforts together will not be enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently without significant policy changes. And right now, we don’t have the right policies because the wrong policymakers are in charge. We need to end the mammoth taxpayer-funded subsidies that encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels. We need to place a direct or indirect price on carbon pollution to encourage the use of cheaper, sustainable alternatives that are already out there. New laws and regulations may be needed as well to encourage innovation and force more rapid reductions in emissions.

The political reconfiguration we have desperately needed has been excruciatingly slow in coming, but we now seem to be at an inflection point, when political change begins to unroll more rapidly than we thought was possible. It’s Dornbusch’s Law, brought to politics.

The people, in their true function as the sovereign power, are quickly understanding the truth of this crisis, and they are the ones who must act, especially because the president is not on speaking terms with the truth and seems well beyond the reach of reason.

This will require a ferocious attack on the complacency, complicity, duplicity and mendacity of those in Congress who have paid for their careers by surrendering their votes and judgment to powerful special interests that are sacrificing the planet for their greed. To address the climate crisis, we must address the democracy crisis so that the people themselves can reclaim control of their destiny.

As has often been the case in successful political revolutions, young people have taken up the gauntlet with inspiring passion. Greta Thunberg has stirred millions as the school strike movement she began in Sweden spreads to many countries. The Sunrise Movement, the Extinction Rebellion, Zero Hour and other youth-led movements are gathering momentum daily. On Friday, hundreds of thousands of people around the world were marching and gathering to call for action on climate change. Employees of many corporations are aggressively demanding that their employers take action to help save the climate balance.

The “blue wave” that gave Democrats control of the House in last year’s midterm elections was fueled in part by concern about climate. The Green New Deal, introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, ties solutions to the climate crisis to environmental justice and a “just transition” that will create millions of well-paying jobs. This effort has won support from many Americans, just as the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s attracted wide approval and helped pave the way for an arms control agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union.

Virtually all of this year’s Democratic presidential candidates are making the climate a top priority. Many have released impressive and detailed plans that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. A CNN poll in April found that the climate crisis was the No. 1 concern of Democrats who are registered to vote. Another recent poll showed that a record 79 percent of American adults and 86 percent of teenagers believe, finally, that the climate crisis is caused by human activity, and, even more significantly, so do 60 percent of Republicans. Americans’ disapproval of President Trump’s approach to the climate was higher, at 67 percent, than on any other issue.

College Republicans at dozens of schools have called on the Republican National Committee to support a carbon tax and have loudly warned the party that it will forfeit support from younger voters if it does not. Another recent poll shows that 67 percent of millennial Republican voters say their party needs to do more on climate.

Next year’s election is the crucial test of the nation’s commitment to addressing this crisis, and it is worth remembering that on the day after the 2020 election, the terms of the Paris climate accord will permit the United States to withdraw from it. We cannot allow that to happen. Political will is a renewable resource and must be summoned in this fight. The American people are sovereign, and I am hopeful that they are preparing to issue a command on the climate to those who purport to represent them: “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his work to slow global warming. He is the author of, among other books, “An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming.”