Hiding in Plain Sight

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After endless Sturm und Drang, and billions of words, our political reality has settled itself for the time being. We know who the winners are and what their power means. But after the prolonged carnival of primaries and conventions, polls and bombshells, there was something else happening, far bigger in scale and importance. I’m willing to bet that not six voters in a hundred knew about it.

What happened was a rapid and alarming spike in the temperature of the earth. Temperatures have been increasing for decades now, a steady and ominous rise of the mercury. But beginning in the spring of 2023—beginning, ironically, with the onset of the political season in the United States—the ramp-up turned into a ski jump. Suddenly temperatures were soaring, month after month setting new all-time records. The scientists who study such things told us that the earth was experiencing temperatures higher than any in at least the past 125,000 years.

That seems like a story—and indeed, most news outlets gave it one. One. Not the dozens that accompanied every twist and turn of the political season, but a single story, noting the fact at least obliquely that no other group of humans we’d recognize as a civilization has ever inhabited a world this warm. The manifestations of that warmth, at their most dramatic, are impossible to ignore, and so the wildfires and hurricanes and floods have been covered. But not in such a way that it seems to have broken through that the most important thing that ever happened is happening right now.

One proof of this is that a majority of Americans voted for Donald Trump, a man who kept repeating that climate change was a hoax—and that if it wasn’t, that was a good thing, because it would “create more oceanfront property.” (If you’ve ever sat in a tub and watched the rising bathwater engulf your navel you know even that is nonsensically backward. But almost none of the coverage bothered to point that out.) Another proof is that people simply don’t know that it’s hotter now than it’s ever been; they simply are not aware.

The longtime human (and journalistic) conceit that the natural world is a subset of the economic one, and that the political reality is the most important one, will now be tested. Our political campaigns—thanks to the candidates and to the people who cover them—have not prepared us for the moment now dawning. We barely discussed, for instance, the fact that the insurance system is breaking apart under the stress of climate change. (The actuarial table, such a powerful human technology, essentially depends on the world behaving in the future as it has in the past, which is now a sucker’s bet.) We are wandering too blindly into an impossible future.

But the news mostly missed the other half of this story too, the good news. How many people could tell you that, over the course of America’s campaign cycle, we passed the line where humans are installing a gigawatt’s worth—a nuclear power plant’s worth—of solar panels each day? Not many, I think, because when I supply that news to crowds of (environmentally interested) people they audibly gasp in pleasure. As far as I can tell, I may still be the only reporter to have pointed out that, thanks to Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford, California has used a quarter less natural gas to generate electricity this year than last because its solar panels and batteries have finally achieved critical mass. A quarter less natural gas in a year in the world’s fifth-largest economy is the biggest single bite yet taken out of the eventual temperature of the earth, and yet it is passing mostly unnoticed. A tiny minority of our readers understand that solar and wind power are now the cheapest power on earth. They still think of them as the Whole Foods of energy, when in reality they’re the Costco—cheap, and available in bulk.

This misunderstanding is not for lack of great environmental reporters. We have lots now, from Sammy Roth anchoring Los Angeles Times coverage on the West Coast to the climate teams at the Washington Post and the New York Times. They produce spectacular work, often in conjunction with graphics teams that have shown particular skill in delineating the crisis at hand. There are some excellent newsletter writers and bloggers. I am grateful for them, after many years of feeling alone on this beat.

But all the great reporting can’t create a new reality. That takes editors willing to repeat these things constantly—as they were willing to repeat, say, the idea that Joe Biden was too old or that our colleges were too woke. When coverage reaches some saturation level, it defines a new reality, and then candidates are forced to respond to that reality. That saturation worked—too well, maybe—for inflation. But there hasn’t been that kind of repetition about our most basic scientific reality. So it’s one thing among many. The only thing saturated about climate change is the overheated air—with water vapor, which explains all those TikTok images of cars floating down the main streets of flooded cities.

There’s perhaps no cure for this. Climate change just moves too slowly for the news cycle, though it moves steadily. It lacks the inherent novelty—the literal newsiness—that makes it a priority for anyone to cover, and indeed for anyone to read. It’s possible, that is, that this failure has something to say about journalism—that something can hide in plain sight if it’s large enough.

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Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His work can be found in The New Yorker and his free Substack newsletter, The Crucial Years.