What is Climate Science for?

There is only one strategy for mitigating climate change: to divorce ourselves from fossil fuels. By this metric—the only one that matters—science programmes in the US have been remarkably unsuccessful. An impressive 15 per cent of Americans, among the largest share of any rich country, deny the existence of climate change. Astonishingly, so does nearly a quarter of US Congress. US emissions and fossil fuel production continue to reach record highs. Climate change has never been more deadly or costly, particularly for lower-income American households. Disasters like hurricanes, droughts and forest fires now occur every two weeks in the US. In 2023 and 2024, climate and weather-related disasters exceeded $1 billion in damages on 55 separate occasions.

Divorcing the US (and the wider global) economy from fossil fuels implies nothing short of a total transformation in the way we produce and consume. To understand why this is true, and the extent of the damage caused by a policy approach that prioritizes technological solutions that allow fossil fuel use to continue, we need to understand just what it means to burn fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are the accumulation of tremendous amounts of organic matter collected over phenomenally long periods of time—the product of billions of dead plants, and the animals that consumed them, decomposing over some 300 billion years. This is what makes them so energy dense and, by extension, so valuable. But this density also obscures the sheer scale of carbon concentrated in even a small quantity of petrol. One 2003 study calculated that it takes 89 metric tons of ancient plant material to make one US gallon of gasoline. This means that to fill my Toyota Tacoma takes the mass of 378 African elephants in plant material. Viewed another way, it takes approximately 50 times all the plant material currently covering the surface of the Earth to generate one year’s worth of global fossil fuel consumption. This is an unfathomable volume, consumed daily through the unimpeded burning of fossil fuel. It is no wonder that the planet is destabilizing faster than we can develop the technology to repair it. 

As the world’s leading fossil fuel producer, the United States is an unlikely candidate for incubating, let alone enacting, transformative responses to the climate crisis, not least within a timeframe that reflects its urgency. At the same time, the US has for decades set the tone for global climate change mitigation, with US economic, security and geopolitical interests shaping global climate science and action in their image.