Inevitable Planetary Doom Has Been Exaggerated

It feels as if the world is on fire—and it is. In the last days of the Trump administration, U.S. government scientists announced that 2020 was one of the two hottest years in recorded history. The other hottest year was 2016: fittingly, the year that the United States elected Donald Trump president, a disaster for the environment as well as democratic norms.

I am an environmental writer, and in the environmental world, the past year in particular has felt like an endless series of reactions to immediate crises: constant rollbacks of environmental protections, the pandemic complicating environmental work, colossal wildfires that torched the West. (The offices of the local climate-justice organization I volunteer for , for example.) We were so busy coping with immediate catastrophes, we had little time to make things . Now, with Trump out, many of us can take a breath and think on longer timescales for