Adam McKay: 1.5C Is Terrifying But There Is Something We Haven’t Tried

Adam McKay is a film director and producer. He recently founded Yellow Dot Studios, a media company to fight climate disinformation. Today, he offers a dose of outrage and imagination in the face of dire climate warnings.

By Adam McKay, The Lever

The hot, pissed off, oil-caked cat is now out of the bag.

We will likely cross 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming beyond pre-industrial levels in the next two to four years. This is the temperature at which scientists have warned, for quite some time, serious destabilization may occur. While global temperatures are usually measured as the longer-term trend line rather than a single year’s temperature, 1.5C is a frightening threshold to cross.

Rather than feeling powerless, frustrated, and terrified at this moment, it’s vitally important we take a beat to remember one very important thing:

It’s not supposed to be like this.

Collectively, we’ve gotten very used to governments, media, and industry across the world rarely, if ever, solving problems. It seems in 2023 they exist primarily to make sure the financial markets remain robust and working people stay on mute.

And much how growing up with a gambling-addict dad makes a family normalize last-second missed free throws meaning no lights or food for a month, we have gotten comfortable with ridiculous levels of corruption and incompetence from our elite institutions.

Word salads, incremental gestures, outright BS, and most of all, pretending there is no problem, flood our day-in-day-out public discourse.

So just a reminder that no, you’re not crazy, there are really obvious things we should and could be doing.

Here are six actual steps that any semi-functioning government would be working on if it they were not overrun by billions of dollars in dark and soft money: