A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

Any time I try to convince skeptical people that the world isn’t as bad as they think it is — which I do quite a lot, given that I write a newsletter called Good News — they usually come back with a two-word rejoinder: “climate change.”

It’s a tough one to rebut. Climate change is very real, and its toll is worsening by the year. 2024 was the hottest year on record, and the first year where the average global temperature was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was in the pre-industrial era — a red line set by policymakers as part of the Paris agreement. Antarctica’s winter sea ice dropped to its second-lowest level on record this past fall, while the world has now experienced more than $4 trillion — yes, with a “t” — in damages from extreme weather events since 1970. And in the White House, President Donald Trump is busy eviscerating government climate research and pulling back on clean energy policies.

Climate change presents a difficult challenge to the narrative of progress. Not just because it’s causing death and destruction now, and not just because each year it gets cumulatively worse, but because in many ways it is the direct result of trends that have otherwise made the world better.

Economic growth makes us all better, but it requires more energy, and as long as that energy mostly derives from fossil fuels, which still provide about 80 percent of global energy, it will make the world warmer as well. In a particularly bitter irony, one of the most important environmental advances in recent years — the reduction in conventional air pollution — seems to play a role in accelerating the pace of climate change.

But two things can be true: Even as climate change gets worse every year, every year we’re making more........

© Vox