On her third day as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Marcia Fudge phoned the White House. She had taken over an agency with a role to play addressing a range of crises as the lack of affordable housing in U.S. cities has left hundreds of thousands homeless and millions more in financial straits. She connected with Joe Biden's climate team. Fudge and Gina McCarthy, Biden's national climate adviser, talked about addressing climate change and the affordable-­housing shortage at the same time. Three weeks later, the Administration announced plans to provide for more than 1 million resilient and energy-­efficient housing units. "People are actually, from every agency, knocking on our doors," says McCarthy, "wondering how they can be part of what is essentially a hopeful future."
From her perch in the West Wing, McCarthy has been charged by Biden with overseeing a dramatic shift in the way the U.S. pursues action on climate change. Instead of turning to a select few environment-­focused agencies to make climate policy, McCarthy and her office are working to infuse climate considerations into everything the Administration does. The task force she runs includes everyone from the Secretary of Defense, who is evaluating the climate threat to national security, to the Treasury Secretary, who is working to stem the risk that climate change poses to the financial system.
The approach "affords us the opportunity to be more than greenhouse-gas accountants," says Ali Zaidi, McCarthy's deputy. "We can tackle the breadth of the climate challenge and the opportunity if we map the intersections with housing policy, and the intersection with racial justice, and the intersection with public health."
For decades, the idea that climate change touches everything has grown behind the scenes. Leaders from small island countries have pleaded with the rest of the world to notice how climate change has begun to uproot their lives, in areas from health care to schooling. Social scientists have crunched the data, illuminating how climate change will ripple across society, contributing to a surge in migration, reduced productivity and a spike in crime. And advocates and thinkers have proposed everything from a conscious move to economic degrowth to eco-capitalism to make climate the government's driving force.
Now, spurred by alarming science, growing public fury and a deadly pandemic, government officials, corporate bosses and civil-society leaders are finally waking up to a simple idea whose time has come: climate is everything. It's out of this recognition that the E.U. has allocated hundreds of billions of euros to put climate at the center of its economic plans, seemingly unrelated activist groups have embraced environmental goals, and investors have flooded firms advancing the energy transition with trillions of dollars. "The world is crossing the long-awaited political tipping point on climate right now," says Al Gore, a former U.S. Vice President who won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his climate activism. "We are seeing the beginning of a new era."
The course of climatization—the process by which climate change will transform society—will play out in the coming years in every corner of society. Whether it leads to a more resilient world or exacerbates the worst elements of our society depends on whether we adjust or just stumble through. "We are at the point where climate change means systems change—and almost every system will change," says Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a longtime climate leader. "That understanding is long overdue, but I don't think we know exactly what it means yet. It's a moment of maximum hope; it's also a moment of high risk."
The basis for human civilization was laid roughly 10,000 years ago when, after tens of thousands of years of unpredictable weather, the earth's climate stabilized: weather extremes became more manageable, and humans began to practice agriculture. The global population grew from fewer than 10 million people 10,000 years ago to more than 7.7 billion today. We have a buzzing global economy measured in dollars and cents, but our economic system has failed to account for the role a stable climate played in creating it.
For decades, scientists, activists and economists have warned of growth without concern for the consequences. Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize–winning ­economist who conceptualized GDP, warned in the 1960s that "distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between its costs and return." Gore cautioned in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, that humans need to make the "rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization" or risk losing everything. In 2006, The Stern Review, a groundbreaking report from a group headed by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, found that climate change could drive a 20% decline in global GDP. And in 2014, author and activist Naomi Klein wrote This Changes Everything, arguing that climate change required a reimagination of our economy. Still, for a time, the issue remained a marginal concern for most.
Over the past three years, that has begun to change, at first slowly and then suddenly. In 2018, the U.N. climate-­science body published a ­landmark—and chilling—report warning of a looming catastrophe if the world didn't accelerate the pivot to a low-carbon economy. Protesters took to the streets around the globe. First in Sweden and then on the global stage, Greta Thunberg decried the pursuit of growth without concern for looming catastrophe. In the U.S., the Sunrise Movement, a youth activist group, called for a Green New Deal that would put climate at the center of the American economy, melding action on climate change with progressive priorities. "The climate crisis touches virtually every part of our lived experience, whether it's our health, or our jobs and the economy," Varshini Prakash, a Sunrise Movement co-founder, told TIME in 2019, calling the Green New Deal a "decades-long project to revitalize our economy, to stop climate change and to ensure racial and economic equity."
When COVID-19 hit, the climate conversation at first took a back seat as hospital beds filled. But in the midst of the crisis, interest seemed only to grow as the pandemic reminded people of the risk of ignoring science and the world's interconnectedness. Ahead of the U.S. presidential election, polls showed American voters more concerned about climate change than ever before, and as the pandemic devastated economies, leaders around the world promised to rebuild with climate change in mind. "People are suddenly reflecting: What kind of society, what kind of world, what kind of economy are we living in?" says Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Development Programme. "Climate change suddenly has become a vehicle of green recovery."
Many countries have yet to match the rhetoric with action. A February report from the U.N. found that emissions would decline just 1% by 2030 with nations' commitments, though that estimate notably didn't include countries like the U.S. that had yet to share their plans. But the understanding that halting warming will require considering climate across the economy is now all but universally accepted on the global stage. Unthinkable just a couple of years ago, political leaders have bet their countries' economic futures on climate-fighting measures. "Action on climate is not only necessary for the future of our lives and livelihoods," says Stern. "Climate action is the main engine of growth; it's the growth story of the 21st century."
[video id=hXxmPKGM ]
There is no doubt that the sharpest turnaround is in the U.S., where a President who denied climate change was replaced by one who has made it an organizing principle of economic policy. The Biden Administration's proposed $2.65 trillion infrastructure package, intended to lift the U.S. out of its COVID-driven recession, calls for $174 billion to "win" the electric vehicle market, $35 billion for climate-related research and development, and $100 billion to advance clean energy on the electric grid. Even aspects of the plan that seem unrelated to climate—roads and bridges, housing and broadband—have a climate angle. Transportation infrastructure will be built with resilience to climate risks, new affordable housing will be energy-efficient, and broadband will aid low-carbon industries. More than half of the spending is "clean and climate-friendly," according to a World Resources Institute analysis.
Crucially, a slew of initiatives apart from the infrastructure package seek to address the economic costs of climate change. Flood-insurance premiums are set to rise to reflect flood vulnerability. Financial regulators have begun pushing new rules to require companies to disclose climate risk. In a far-reaching move, the Administration is calculating a new figure to represent the economic cost of each ton of greenhouse-gas emissions. That figure—which could double the level set by Obama—will inform government spending, requiring the rejection of some programs in which the climate costs outweigh economic benefits. "The output of good economic policy is good climate outcomes," says Zaidi.
In the E.U., top officials recount awakening to the need to embrace climate change as a development framework while they prepared for the 2015 climate negotiations that delivered the Paris Agreement. As the European Commission—the bloc's executive body—searched for a path to eliminate the E.U.'s carbon emissions, officials convened a process in which each country dug into its own emissions. They concluded that to cut emissions on the scale required meant incorporating climate across all facets of government. "It permeated down from the top governmental level to all other departments, to the societies, to the industrial stakeholders," says Maros Sefcovic, a vice president of the European Commission who ran the process.
Five years later, the COVID-19 pandemic has given the E.U. the perfect opportunity to accelerate the remaking of its economic agenda with climate at its core—what Sefcovic calls the "new economy of the 21st century." The European Commission framed its pandemic-relief program around a so-called Green Deal that aims to invest hundreds of billions of euros in everything from zero-emission trains to growing renewable-energy capacity. But its true aims are more ambitious than any line item. "If you want to succeed, you have to successfully transform all sectors," says Jeppe Kofod, Denmark's Foreign Minister. "I call it a climate union." A successful centering of climate would place the E.U. at the center of the global economy, setting standards for the world.
Still, the climatization path is not universal progress. Countries can simultaneously invest in a clean economy and continue to prop up polluting industries. In China, the world's largest emitter and second largest economy, officials have made the transition away from high-­carbon industries central to development, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build manufacturing capacity for electric vehicles, solar panels and other clean-energy technology. Recently, it has focused on growing services and the Internet ­economy—rather than carbon-heavy industry. Still, the country continues to finance fossil-fuel development abroad, potentially leaving debtor countries stuck with coal plants and oil pipelines. In the U.S., too, the Biden Administration's focus on expanding clean energy without a more targeted effort to shut down fossil fuels has drawn criticism from climate advocates while the E.U.'s continued reliance on natural gas has done the same across the Atlantic.
These differing approaches to climatization have created a new vector for collaboration as well as conflict. One country's efforts to reduce emissions only matters if the whole world moves, and so as countries prioritize climate change in their own economic planning, pressure has grown to ensure others follow suit. The E.U. has begun the process of linking its climate and trade agendas with a tax on high-carbon imports, penalizing countries slow to act on climate change. Biden has elevated the issue as a diplomatic priority. "Every dialogue that we have we're trying to drive ambition," says John Kerry, Biden's climate envoy and a former U.S. Secretary of State. And many of the multilateral financial institutions that fund economic programs in developing countries have required projects to adapt to new climate realities while addressing other needs.