A forgettable year of climate betrayals

Any optimism that progress was being made on bringing down emissions turned into frustration

- Bibek Bhattacharya

And so, another year of the Anthropocene is about to end. Goodbye 2025, you will not be missed.

You will be remembered, if at all, as yet another year of letdowns and betrayals by world leaders who promised to protect the planet. You will be remembered as the year when the polycrisis of extreme inequality, erosion of democratic freedoms, a greed for other people’s resources, genocidal wars, outright racism and degrading natural ecosystems visibly converged with the climate crisis.

I started writing my Climate Change Tracker column in mid-2018. Over the past seven-and-a-half years, I must have written hundreds of these missives. They have, in a way, been a real-time archive of the climate crisis getting steadily worse, even as scientists published even more detailed and even more urgent studies and warnings. Over the years, any optimism that governments were making progress on bringing down emissions always turned into frustration about the slow, almost inactive global process. Meanwhile, the scale of climate disasters striking India and the world keeps getting bigger and more frequent. In fact, it has reached a point where the thousands of people killed every year by climate disasters has become just another statistic.

It is hard to be a climate journalist and not live with a constant feeling of dread, of wrongness. And the reason for that is listening to governments justify not phasing out fossil fuels on a war footing.