In Short : The 2023 Climate Power Rankings reveal a pivotal year where rising temperatures and climate impacts dominate. This assessment underscores the urgency for robust climate action and highlights the critical need for global efforts to address and mitigate the impacts of climate change.
In Detail : Deadly heat waves gripped the world from Beijing to Phoenix. Corals cooked to death right on their reefs. Seeming climate havens caught fire or flooded. Wildfire smoke made people sick from hundreds of miles away.
For most of the centuries humans have despoiled Earth’s climate, the consequences have felt more like a “tomorrow” problem than a “now” problem. That delusion lost much of its power in 2023. Instead of passing the nightmares we’ve created on to child…
Deadly heat waves gripped the world from Beijing to Phoenix. Corals cooked to death right on their reefs. Seeming climate havens caught fire or flooded. Wildfire smoke made people sick from hundreds of miles away.
The silver lining? It’s harder than ever to deny the reality of climate change and the need to make sure it doesn’t get too much worse. This was the hottest year in recorded human history, but climate scientists reminded us, a la Homer Simpson, that …
The good news is that humans still have the power to decide how much less pleasant things will get. The bad news is that humans aren’t so great at “deciding.” Thus we got yet another year of competing forces wrangling over the planet’s future. Some o…
What follows is the definitive ranking of the biggest players in an eventful 2023 for the climate. For better or worse.
#10: The Carbon Offsets Comeuppance
Carbon offsets, the indulgences that polluting companies and people buy to make themselves feel or look better or both, have been losing favor for years. The elevator pitch against them: They often don’t, how do you say, offset carbon. But a flurry o…
#9: Taylor Swift
The least-escapable musical artist of our time apparently has a terrible medical affliction that forces her to constantly fly on private jets. She produces nearly 1,200 times the average person’s greenhouse-gas emissions each year with her private-je…
#8: India
One of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies also has the world’s third-biggest carbon footprint. The country trumpets big ambitions for renewables. It could set an example of how to develop an economy without ruining the planet. But this…
#7: Elon Musk
On the plus side, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive officer spent 2023 slashing electric-car prices, bringing them tantalizingly closer to the level where consumers who weren’t made out of money could reach them. He struck deals with oil companies and oth…
#6: Fossil Fuels
The former champion of climate change has lost a step lately. But you still can’t sleep on Big Oil. It has oceans of cash and influence, and also oil. It flooded the COP28 climate talks in Dubai with enough lobbyists to be the world’s third-most-repr…
#5: Mia Mottley
The prime minister of Barbados may be the most important climate player you’ve never heard of. She was almost as ubiquitous as Big Oil at COP28. Her plan for climate financing, the Bridgetown Initiative, has basically set the agenda for global talks….
#4: Friederike Otto
If you are being punched repeatedly in the face, you might want to at least know who is doing the punching. This year, the group Otto co-founded, World Weather Attribution, explained how everything from Canadian wildfires to East African droughts to …
#3: Interest Rates
In a bid to slow the economy and fight inflation, the Fed raised interest rates 70,000 times. This didn’t really slow the economy. It might have fought inflation. It definitely made buying a house impossible. It also made it deeply unattractive to fi…
#2: Sultan Al Jaber
It says a lot about 2023 that the head of the state-run oil company of a country groaning with oil riches (United Arab Emirates) managed to negotiate the most aggressive anti-fossil-fuel statement ever produced by a UN climate confab. But here we are…
#1: ‘Gobsmackingly Bananas’ Heat
Please don’t make me run through all the superlatives again. Thanks partly to the El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific but mostly to decades of warming, global temperatures in 2023 smashed record after record, month after month. This year will like…
Honorable Mentions: Wind power, coal, China, Russia, the US, Al Gore, John Kerry, Xie Zhenhua, Rishi Sunak, the Sycamore Gap tree, gas stoves, ancient zombie viruses.