If you’re searching for signs that climate change is a top issue of the 2020 election, look no further than this week’s news cycle: Even with a presidential impeachment underway in Washington, Climate Week NYC is managing to turn heads. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's troubling speech at the U.N. General Assembly yesterday suggested further deforestation of Amazon lies ahead. But he was overshadowed by Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who has galvanized the international climate movement and drawn bile-filled tirades from conservative critics.
In The New Republic’s October issue, Emily Atkin explored the dire predictions for the world over the next 80 years: how climate change could transform international politics and conflict by empowering reactionary strongmen, multiplying famines and refugee crises, and triggering an ever-expanding number of wars over dwindling resources. For the most vulnerable and marginalized among us, Kim Kelly pointed out last week, the physical danger of climate change has already arrived.
The defining feature of Thunberg’s activism, Osita Nwanevu writes—what alternately excites and alienates her viewers—is her insistence that global warming is an existential threat today, not tomorrow. Thunberg’s speeches are not filled with talk of “green stimulus” or gradual adjustment. They ask, instead, for “difficult decisions, in an urgency mindset, about what we should protect and what we should value.”
The New Republic senses that urgency, which is why we're ramping up our climate coverage in the coming weeks and months. Expect more stories like the highlights below.
Heather Souvaine Horn, Deputy Editor
"A rap on climate talk is that it's boring, that it can be technical, doom and gloom without a lot of solutions and remote from people's lives unless you were caught in the middle of something, that it's abstract and a remote threat for the year 2100. Judging from the demand to get on the air by callers and participating in the #PlasticChallenge people were really engaged," Lehrer told CNN Business.
WNYC is one of more than 300 media outlets that have agreed to use the lead-up to the UN Climate Action Summit on Monday to elevate stories about the climate crisis. Covering Climate Now is spearheaded by progressive publication The Nation and by Columbia Journalism Review, which billed it as "the biggest effort ever undertaken to organize the world's press around a single topic." Soon after Climate Change Now launched in April, The Guardian also joined the effort as a "lead media partner," and newsrooms have been signing on ever since. The partner list includes wire services, photo agencies, newspapers, magazines, digital outlets and individual journalists. | 
