2024 did not end well. I'm still reeling from 5 hammer blows:

Biodiversity Bust

The big biodiversity conference in Colombia in October was expected to add some real substance to the critically important “30 by 30“ pledge agreed to the year before—that's 30% of the world's unique places and oceans to be fully protected by 2030.

The world's wealthier countries have most of the money but have lost most of their biodiversity in making that money. And the world's poorer countries have most of the biodiversity but not much money to protect it. Theoretically, that makes for a marriage made in heaven. But the parties fell out badly long before they got to the altar.

Trump II

The excellent climate denier-in-chief is back, and climate change is still, apparently, the same old hoax that it was eight years ago when he last ended up in the White House.

It's hard to see much upside here, but I will work on it over the next few years.

CoP29 melts down

Asking oil-rich Azerbaijan to host the big, end-of-year climate conference was as crazy as asking the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, as happened in 2023. So, no one was surprised when it ended in yet another failure in November—apart, perhaps, from the tone-deaf president of Azerbaijan, who opened the conference by reminding delegates that his country's massive oil and gas assets were “a gift from God” that he was under a divine obligation to make the most of.

Let’s hear it for plastic

Negotiations in December around a new global Plastics Treaty ended badly, with Big Oil stamping its huge feet to prevent governments from agreeing on any limitation on new plastic production in the future. Big Oil: 1; 175 sovereign nations: 0. Instead, we must improve the recycling facilities at the end of our road, and all will be well. (Some governments demand a rematch in 2025, but I wouldn't hold your breath.).

1.6°C—and rising

The year ended with the Copernicus Climate Change Service (the EU’s principal center of climate expertise) confirming that 2024 was the hottest year ever, with an average temperature of 1.6°C above the baseline during the Industrial Revolution. Just like that: the 1.5°C critical, never-to-be-breached threshold duly breached. (And I'm duly bound to remind readers that 2025 may turn out to be less hot than 2024—but I think we all get the inexorable direction of travel here.).

I appreciate that I'm taking a significant risk by imposing so much doom and gloom on you, especially given that I don't yet know my Meer readers very well. But I'm a stickler for telling things as they are, not as we might want them to be in a better world. This is why I'm getting more and more concerned about what has been described as “toxic positivity.”

Here's the problem. We know things are bad (but we’re understandably reluctant to acknowledge just how bad). And a non-stop blizzard of climate-relevant data prevents us from seeing things as they are.

For instance, we love talking about targets (and what might be achieved if those targets are met). We love pontificating about projections—in terms of what might happen as we reach various arbitrary milestones in the future. We love celebrating the emergence of new pledges hammered out through various voluntary processes. We've still got a bit of a thing about scenarios as if they have any bearing on physical reality. And, boy, do we get our rocks off on second-order data sets—such as the annual growth in the percentage of renewables, for instance, in EVs or other potential breakthrough technologies.

Don't get me wrong. We should indeed be encouraged by all that positive technology stuff. But it's all ‘second-order’ precisely because it's not shifting the dial on the prominent trends that tell us we're still heading straight for the apocalypse.

For instance, the astonishing growth in renewables and its total contribution to global electricity supply has not reduced the burning of coal, oil, or gas. It's all been additional, accounting for continuing growth in energy demand, but not substituting for those fossil fuels. It's the same problem with EVs.

So, away with all those targets, projections, pledges, scenarios, and second-order data sets! Let’s agree, as good climate realists, to focus only on the data that matters: volumes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases emitted every year; concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere; annual emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas; from the production of plastics, concrete, and steel; and global agriculture, mainly from meat and dairy—chucking in a couple of ‘big ones’ (levels of subsidies for fossil fuels; annual rates of deforestation) and planning for the long term by focusing on world population peaking and then reducing.

That's The Dirty Dozen that matters. If all those indicators start heading down at the correct rate, then crack open the champagne. If they don't, really, very soon indeed, reach for the wormwood.

If you rely on those first-order indicators, it's much harder to be optimistic about the future than if you just jolly along with all that second-order stuff. But that's precisely what so many ‘stubborn optimists’ and ‘resolute solutions’ prefer to do. And they love telling everybody else (including me) that it's what we should all be doing—to avoid disempowering people with too much of that wretched climate realism.

This can get quite oppressive. I have serious reservations about much of the shiny optimism and positivity espoused by big business and political leaders, which seems primarily to be about bolstering people's confidence that we'll be able to maintain our privileged, insanely wasteful Western lifestyles. That kind of hope tethers us to today's profoundly inequitable and unsustainable distribution of resources. And we all need to beware of that kind of coercive, toxic positivity.

As it happens, there's a lot to be hopeful about going on out there—and my pledge for 2025 is to share as much of that as I can without falling into the toxic positivity trap.