Opinion: ‘Climate cheating,’ carbon exchanges, and debt swaps in 2024

The political atmosphere around climate change is rapidly heating up alongside the planet. Expect them both to get hotter still in 2024.

Every tenth of a degree increase in global warming makes the “catastrophic” and “unprecedented” heatwaves, fires, and floods of previous decades now seem like run-of-the-mill, seasonal occurrences. The 1.5-degree Celsius target from the Paris Agreement on climate change looks like toast.

That’s the climate situation. The politics look like this: Low-emitting, low-income countries that are most vulnerable to climate disasters are understandably furious with the high-emitting countries which, ignoring the repeated warnings of their own scientists for the last 30 years, have cooked our atmosphere with carbon pollution.