Climate change's crucial moment
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Scientists for decades have warned of the time when climate change would begin to change our daily lives. We're now entering that moment.
The big picture: The Fed, corporate executives, college students, retailers and politicians are all coming to grips with this seminal challenge. We as a species are now living with this problem like never before.
Climate change is ...
- Hitting the bottom lines of all sorts of companies, whether it’s BP worried about leaving its oil in the ground or Big Pharma poised to profit off the additional drugs we’ll need in a warmer world.
- Intensifying our temperatures, storms and wildfires.
- Altering what we eat. New meat-like foods are on the menu and beef sellers are searching for ways to satisfy red-meat diets without the carbon footprint of cows.
- Exacerbating global conflict as the disparate impacts start to shift geopolitics.
- Supercharging our politics, with a president who mocks it and a Democratic Party that calls it a crisis.
Between the lines: We're entering a period of heightened awareness about the problem while simultaneously struggling to address it, given our world's continued deep reliance on cheap oil, natural gas and coal to power our lives.
- It isn't a black-and-white problem, but it is a black-and-white moment wherein we have to decide whether to take big action.
The bottom line: We have been driving climate change for decades, and we’ll be dealing with it for centuries — but we can still manage and minimize it.
Read more about the impacts of climate change we're tracking:
