Why we can't lose hope

It’s been nearly 10 years since the Paris Agreement on climate change — a radiant moment of hope for the world’s efforts to curb fossil fuel pollution.

I wrote a column for CNN today about how much has changed in the decade since.

And, more importantly, about why we must refuse to give up hope.

Some of the activists I spoke with warned against a view of climate action that’s too U.S.-centric and overly warped by the retrograde pull of the Trump Admin. I do think there’s some truth in that framing. And I do think it’s clear how the public feels:

… 89% of the global public surveyed in a 2024 study favored stronger political action on climate change.

“That is a supermajority,” said Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, the group behind a media collaboration called the 89 Percent Project. “And it’s a [super]majority that doesn’t know that it’s a majority. People in that majority think that they’re 29% of the population. They think they’re a minority.”

But even in the United States, positive trends hold: 79% of registered voters surveyed in May 2025 said they support the US being part of the Paris Agreement and 75% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

The point: We have more power than we give ourselves credit for.

I also wrote in the piece about how I keep a memento from the Marshallese delegation to Paris on my desk, all these years later (and all these desks later; I’ve moved three times since then! I’m a professor in Oregon these days)…

On the day the Paris Agreement was adopted, I spent hours with the delegation from the Marshall Islands, a nation of low-lying islands in the Pacific that fears being subsumed by rising seas. I’d visited the country earlier in 2015 for a CNN article. I’ll never forget a woman telling me that the sound of the ocean, which used to lull her to sleep, had become threatening after waves crashed through her home and flooded it. Her family had decided to move to Arkansas to get far away from the water and that sound.

The Marshallese delegation in Paris gave me a palm frond ribbon to remember them by. I kept it in my pocket as I relayed news of the agreement to viewers around the world.

It’s sitting on my desk as I type this, 10 years later.

It reminds me that the optimism and the urgency of that moment have not been forgotten.

I know it will help to have that little memento around as I watch news coming in from the COP30 talks in Brazil, which start Monday. I can’t help but feeling a little naive for having written, in 2015, that “this is the end of fossil fuels” — referring to the Paris Agreement. It wasn’t, of course. But it doesn’t change the fact that we know that’s the direction the world must head if we are going to stabilize the atmosphere. And if anything, we know, 10 years on, that getting there is entirely possible.

Thank you all for reading this post. Please feel free to share the newsletter with a friend. It’s been a WHILE since I’ve been active here, but I’m going to start posting more. Please shoot me a note and let me know what you think. What you’d like to see more/less of. How you’re feeling about the state of the climate 10 years on, etc.

Warmly,

John