In Manhattan’s Union Square, mounted on a building home to a Best Buy and $8,000-a-month one-bedroom apartments, is a public art installation known as the Climate Clock. Between flashes of “Stop Fossil Fuels” and “Protect Earth,” the clock counts down—to the second—until the world is committed irreversibly to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. When the clock was first unveiled in September 2020, the world had about seven years and 100-odd days to act. When I visited this February, the countdown stood at three years and 156 days.
Yet even before the clock reaches zero, it has already become something of a relic. Even beyond the Republican-led assault on climate—part of the broader ideological war on environmental, social, and governance standards and “woke capitalism”—the past few years have seen a stunning retreat from target-based climate goals as climate elites have walked back their previously hawkish positions. Bill Gates, for whom climate change has long been a signature issue, published a memo last October in the lead-up to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Brazil, or COP30, criticizing the “doomsday outlook” of the climate community.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who as governor of the Bank of England described climate change as a “defining issue for financial stability” and who in 2021 championed a series of landmark net-zero financial agreements during COP26 in Scotland, is now aggressively fast-tracking permits for liquefied natural gas export terminals. The same banks that once promised to no longer provide financing for new coal projects or drilling in the Arctic in the name of supporting net-zero goals have recently begun issuing forecasts about the business opportunities that 3 degrees of warming could bring.
