Elizabeth Kolbert
On Monday, a new round of international climate talks will open in Azerbaijan, a country that earns ninety per cent of its export income selling fossil fuels. Depending on how you look at things, this situation is either farcical or grimly appropriate. Last week, in the run-up to the conference, Copernicus, the earth-observation arm of the European Union, reported that global temperatures this year will, for the first time, average more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels. Also last week, the United States elected a climate denier as President.
“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world, more than Saudi Arabia,” Donald Trump crowed in his victory speech, apparently referring to oil. (According to most reliable sources, including the C.I.A., America’s oil reserves are actually only one-seventh the size of Saudi Arabia’s.) In response to Trump’s election, Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, declared the U.S. a nascent “petrostate” and predicted that the country “will, in short order, join an alliance of petrostate bad actors” to “block meaningful progress” on climate change.
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