The damage caused by climate change over this past year was at times so immense it was hard to comprehend. In Pakistan alone, extreme summer flooding killed thousands, displaced millions and caused over $40 billion in losses. Fall floods in Nigeria killed hundreds and displaced over 1 million people. Droughts in Europe, China and the U.S. dried out once-unstoppable rivers and slowed the flows of commerce on major arteries like the Mississippi and the Rhine.
In the face of these extremes, the human response was uneven at best. Consumption of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, rebounded in 2022. Countries like the U.K. and China seemed to back away from major climate pledges.
But all of this gloom came with more than a silver lining. In fact, it’s all too easy to overlook the steps toward a lower-carbon world that came about in between more attention-getting catastrophes.
