There’s A New World Ahead — And It Wasn’t Built On Hope

Thirty dirty COPs. One closed strait. The fossil fuel era just ran out of people willing to wait for it to end on its own terms.

It’s March 1995. The atmosphere carries 360 parts per million of carbon dioxide and Berlin smells like coal smoke and reunification. The wall is six years gone, the city is rebuilding itself faster than its memory can keep up, and a forty-year-old environment minister named Angela Merkel is hosting the first United Nations conference on climate change i…