It’s always difficult to tell what trajectory the world is on—whether the events filling our days signal something genuinely new being born, or old forces straining to hold their ground. That confusion is especially acute in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. His default governing style is manic action: He says and does more in a day (almost all of it ugly and wrong) than former presidents would say and do in a month. He appears to set the agenda by force alone, invading Venezuela, say, and demanding its oil, tearing at its institutions as if novelty itself were power.
Step back, though, and the picture looks different. Despite the daily churn, what’s become clear over the last 12 months is that two forces are reshaping this world in ways far more consequential than Trump’s aggression—and they are both profoundly new. These forces may, in fact, be the action, and Trump the reaction.
The first is the ever-mounting impact of a hotter planet. Climate change is, for the moment, not an urgent political issue, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there, exerting pressure that grows year by year. Some of its effects are unmistakable: the burning of Los Angeles, say. Others are quieter, but just as important, like the insurance industry rapidly losing its ability to price risk in a world increasingly governed by new physics. Without that backstop, capitalism starts to seize up, leaving homeowners stranded and lenders reluctant to finance projects in places where the next disaster could wipe out a balance sheet. This is what climate change looks like in the economy. It doesn’t need to win elections to matter; it can afford to wait, steadily gathering force.
The second force is the relentless fall in the price of energy from the sun and wind. This is an economic fact as stubborn as gravity. For the past four or five years, we’ve lived on an Earth where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. Last year, roughly 95% of new power generation globally came from renewables.