Mother Pelican
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability

Vol. 22, No. 9, September 2026 Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor

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As America Turns 250, Its Attention to Continued Survival Fades and Fractures Richard Heinberg This article was originally published on MuseLetter, July 2026 REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION In memoriam Richard Heinberg, a giant of the environmental movement, passed away 19 July 2026 United States politicians, even Democratic ones, no longer mention climate change, according to a recent report by Grist. Evidently, after their 2024 election losses, Democrats concluded that global warming isn’t a winning issue. Their calculus is somewhat confirmed by a recent Pew poll that ranks climate change only ninth among Americans’ top concerns.  Meanwhile, hard-won US national climate data, scenarios, and analyses are quietly disappearing from official government websites. A prime example is the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a county-by-county description of likely risks from 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels. This preeminent report on climate impacts and responses is a congressionally mandated, interagency effort to provide “the scientific foundation to support informed decision-making across the nation.” A clone of the government website is being hosted by Climate.us; the Trump administration has taken down the official site, which was here. Those seeking to downplay climate change did a victory dance in May, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced it was retiring its RCP8.5 scenario—the worst-case trajectory in which humanity continues increasing its greenhouse gas emissions through the end of the century. We at Post Carbon Institute have been saying for a decade or more that this scenario was unrealistic and should be dropped, since it assumes the burning of more fossil fuels than the Earth can reasonably supply. However, axing RCP8.5 at this politically fraught moment has simply fed a predictable gloat-fest on the part of climate deniers. For example, the New York Post editorial board proclaimed that the revision showed climate warnings had done “untold damage” to the public, the economy, and “the average man’s pocketbook.” Fox News host Sean Hannity asserted that a “top U.N.-backed climate change panel is now waving the white flag of surrender” and “quietly admitting that the Earth will not in fact be destroyed by climate change.” Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social that the United Nations had just admitted that its own climate projections were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” and called global warming research a “Green New Scam.” Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s becoming clearer that Earth is breaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit to which world leaders pledged, in 2015, to limit global warming in their effort to avert a catastrophic future. Earth first exceeded the 1.5-degree threshold in 2024; however, in 2025, the global average surface temperature cooled to 1.44 degrees above baseline (2025 was still the third-warmest year on record). The 1.5°C limit is defined in the Paris Agreement as a multi-year average temperature; by that standard, many climate scientists expect the limit to be breached before 2030. Overall, Earth’s march toward 2 degrees of warming is accelerating. The question climate experts are now asking: will it still be possible to keep warming below 3 degrees by the end of the century? The difference in impacts between 1.5, 2, and 3 degrees would be monumental: at 3 degrees, 3.25 billion people would be exposed to deadly heat-humidity conditions at least annually. As I write this, Europe is emerging from an unprecedented heat wave in which over 1,300 people died from causes linked to high temperatures. Europe is the fastest-warming continent, heating at twice the global average—but its people are unaccustomed to, and unprepared for, sustained searing heat. According to research associate Theo Keeping at Imperial College, London, “this heat wave would have been virtually impossible even 50 years ago without human-caused climate change.” On the other side of the pond, as the US is celebrating its 250th Independence Day, a heat dome has settled over the eastern half of the country, with more than 160 million Americans under extreme heat warnings. Also, an unusually strong El Niño is developing in the eastern Pacific. Expected impacts of this “super” El Niño include increased flood risks in the southern US, drier and hotter weather in South America, and prolonged drought and reduced agricultural output in southern Asia. Climate change is a contributor to the unusual strength of this El Niño: due to continued global heating, ocean temperatures are now at the highest level ever recorded. While El Niño is a naturally occurring climate cycle, hotter ocean waters are driving that cycle to extremes. One more result of climate change: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a global deep-ocean current that, among other things, helps keep Europe warm, is slowing. Cold meltwater from Greenland and Arctic sea ice is diluting the dense, salty ocean water that drives the current. The complete halting of the current before the end of this century, once considered a remote possibility, is now being given higher odds by climate scientists and oceanographers. See the recent Crazy Town podcast episode featuring Emily Schoerning for a fascinating discussion of this globe-changing development. Collectively, we seem to have wandered into a peculiar new psychological-political terrain: as we approach the collapse of Earth systems and therefore of civilizational support pillars, rational worries are being replaced with delusions. The reasons are no doubt complex and include the rise of social media, the consolidation of media companies, the politicizing of climate discourse by fossil fuel companies, and the emergence of right-wing centi-billionaires intent on shaping the attitudes of entire nations. But I’ll add one more possible explanation in half-jest. In his science blog, Ugo Bardi suggests that rising CO₂ levels in Earth’s atmosphere, in addition to warming the planet, will also gradually degrade human intelligence. As evidence, he cites a 2024 paper by neuroscientist Richard Buxton of the University of California San Diego showing that “the oxygen-to-CO₂ balance in brain tissue is crucial. As CO₂ rises, the energy available to sustain neural activity falls.” The US has always been a conflicted, if not crazy, country (after all, it tolerated slavery for decades and elected Donald Trump as president twice). Maybe now, with the nation at age 250, the extra CO₂ that it’s breathing is starting to erode whatever remains of its collective rationality. If you want to buck that trend, don’t lose sight of the big picture (Earth is a system of systems, nature must be at the center of human concerns, and energy is the true currency). Adjust your views as needed to incorporate new data and events. Don’t succumb to political doom scrolling. And surround yourself with green plants producing lots of oxygen. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Richard Heinberg passed away unexpectedly in July 2026. Read this rememberance by Asher Miller. He was regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. He was Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute for nearly twenty years. Richard was the author of fourteen books, including some of the seminal works on society’s current energy and environmental sustainability crisis: Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (New Society, 2021) power.postcarbon.org Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy, co-authored with David Fridley (Island Press, 2016; French edition 2019) ourrenewablefuture.org Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels (New Society, 2015) Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future (Post Carbon Institute, 2013; UK, Dutch, Spanish, and Romanian editions 2014) The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (New Society, 2011; UK, Chinese, Korean, Dutch, and French editions 2012; German and Spanish editions 2014) Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (New Society, 2009; UK edition 2010) Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (New Society, 2007; UK, German, and Korean editions, 2008) The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse (New Society, 2006; UK edition, 2006) Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (New Society, 2004; UK edition 2005; Arabic edition, 2017) The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003; UK, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Arabic editions, 2004-2005; revised North American edition, 2005; French edition 2008) Richard authored hundreds of essays and articles that have appeared in such journals as Nature, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, The American Prospect, Public Policy Research, Quarterly Review, Literary Review, Yes!, and The Sun; and on websites such as Resilience.org, CommonDreams.org, Alternet.org, ProjectCensored.org, and Counterpunch.com. His monthly MuseLetter was published for 400 consecutive months since 1992, and was included in Utne Magazine’s annual list of Best Alternative Newsletters. Richard delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences on six continents, addressing policy makers at many levels, from local City Councils to members of the European Parliament. He has been quoted and interviewed countless times for print (including for Reuters, the Associated Press, and Time), television (including Good Morning America, National Geographic, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Al-Jazeera, and C-SPAN), and radio (including NPR, WABC, and Air America). Richard appeared in many film and television documentaries, including Leonardo DiCaprio’s 11th Hour. He was a recipient of the Atlas Award for climate heroes (2012) and the M. King Hubbert Award for Excellence in Energy Education (2006). In 2012 Richard was appointed to His Majesty the King of Bhutan’s International Expert Working Group for the New Development Paradigm initiative. Richard wrote and narrated Post Carbon Institute’s animated video 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds (winner of a YouTubes’s/DoGooder 2011 Video of the Year Award), which has viewed by nearly two million people and translated into multiple languages. He was also the co-author and narrator of Post Carbon Institute’s 22-video Think Resilience online course. |Back to Title| LINK TO THE CURRENT ISSUE          LINK TO THE HOME PAGE

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