You’d be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarkable efficiency of heat pumps is driving their own uptake now. Sales of electric vehicles could surpass those of gas-burning cars in the next six years. The world’s biggest powers are putting huge sums toward infrastructure to usher in some form of energy transformation. Pledges are being made; legislation is being passed. The world, it seems, is finally lurching in the right direction.

But none of that is enough, practically speaking, because of one enormous hitch: The world is still using more energy each year, our consumption ticking ever upward, swallowing any gains made by renewable energy. Emissions are still rising—more slowly than they used to but, nonetheless, rising. Instead of getting pushed down, that needle is fitfully jiggling above zero, clawing into the positive digits when it needs to be deeply pitched into the negative. We are, in other words, simply not making a dent.

And so we are now in climate purgatory. In this zone, countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things. The International Energy Agency predicts that demand for fossil fuels will peak by 2030. Yet a report released by the United Nations and several climate organizations this week found that governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned. In total, countries that hold the world’s oil, gas, and coal deposits still plan to produce 69 percent more fossil fuels than is compatible with keeping warming under 2 degrees Celsius, the riskier cousin to the 1.5-degree-Celsius goal each of those countries pledged to aim for. Many experts now consider that goal impossible, because of global reluctance to phase out fossil fuels. One expert who worked on the UN report called this “insanity,” a “climate disaster of our own making.” The climate math is not adding up.

Perhaps you’ve suspected this. One hardly needs to look out the window to register the effects of these choices. This year of fires and floods is on track to be the hottest year on record. And the global ocean, which absorbs the preponderance of the excess energy in the global system, is heating at an accelerating rate; the ocean was the warmest on record in August 2023, according to NOAA. In all likelihood, with El Niño persisting into the new year, 2024 will probably be even warmer.

The scientist James Hansen, famous for his early warnings about climate change, suggested in a paper released last week with a suite of high-level colleagues that warming is accelerating more rapidly than is presently understood: In their view, that the Earth could exceed 1.5 degrees of warming this decade is practically assured, and 2 degrees by 2050 is likely unless the world eliminates fossil-fuel use far faster than planned. These new calculations are a reflection of just how many variables go into making the livable conditions we call “the climate,” and how messing with one, even with good intentions, can have cascading effects. Part of the problem, these researchers found, was that regulations passed to reduce harmful sulfate-aerosol emissions from shipping vessels worked. Sulfate aerosols are bad for human health. But they also reflect solar radiation back into space, so less pollution also means that the Earth is absorbing that much more energy and heating up that much faster. “That’s why global warming will accelerate. That’s why global melting will accelerate,” Hansen said at a press conference.

Some fellow climate scientists found the paper’s exact predictions questionable, calling them too alarmist and arguing that the temperature will take a bit longer to change. But even if researchers disagree on the details, their worry over our climatic future is apparent. Their usual tone of reserve is melting away. Typically circumspect scientists are beginning to sound desperate, the despair leaking out in their exhortations to the public to take climate change for the emergency it is. They are publicly mourning the species they study: the emperor-penguin scientist facing down the loss of her subjects, the coral-reef scientist recognizing that no reef is safe from bleaching. One climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather, called recent global temperature data “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.” Whichever way you cut it, global warming is already happening too fast to generously support life, which our prior climate did quite well. As a feebly supportive climate devolves into an unsupportive one, it won’t matter who forecasted the timing right, only that we missed our chance at the good version of Earth.

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And that is where the math is still pointing: Emissions tick up, global temperatures tick up, and the consequences unfold. Kaitlin Naughten, an ocean-ice modeler for the British Antarctic Survey, co-authored a paper in the journal Nature last month warning that the loss of much of West Antarctica’s ice sheet is now virtually inevitable. Even if future emissions are drastically curtailed, enough warming is probably locked in to wash the bulk of the sheet away. At best, she says, we are on the brink of its total loss becoming assured. The exact timing of the sheet’s total disappearance, too, is unclear. But by one estimate, the West Antarctic ice sheet contains enough water to raise sea level globally by just over five meters, or 17 feet. At the very least, Naughten told me, she thinks it would be wise to plan for two to three meters of sea-level rise, or six to ten feet, in the next couple of centuries. “We already have a refugee crisis; I shudder to think what would happen if everyone living within two meters of sea level would be displaced,” she added. That “everyone” is projected to include some 410 million by 2100.

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“I think as a climate scientist you get used to screaming into the void. You get used to people just ignoring you,” Naughten told me. Previous studies have warned of the ice sheet’s collapse if emissions were not drawn down; hers now suggests that we’ve passed the point of no return, that even significant emissions cuts would be too late for this particular ice sheet. (The East Antarctic ice sheet, she said, is far more stable—and good thing, because it contains enough frozen water for 10 times the amount of sea-level rise as its western counterpart.) As the global community prepares for COP28, the next round of international climate negotiations that begins later this month, France, Ireland, Kenya, Spain, and 12 other countries have called for a global accord to phase out fossil-fuel production. There is little doubt that this is necessary; adding more fossil fuels to the pipeline is quite obviously counterproductive to slowing, then stopping, climate change.

Yet in the U.S. alone, a country responsible for at least 20 percent of historical emissions, the current buildout of liquified-natural-gas infrastructure, intended to export the country’s plentiful gas, is the largest fossil-fuel expansion proposed in the world—and it’s happening under a president who recently passed the most impactful climate legislation the country has ever seen. That climate math isn’t adding up. China, which is responsible for about 12 percent of historical emissions according to Alex Wang, who studies Chinese environmental governance at UCLA, has one of the largest clean-power programs in the world. But the country is at the same time dramatically expanding its coal production.

Right now, these disjuncts are allowed to persist as if they are not contradictions: In the places still extracting and using the most fossil fuels, like the U.S., leaders aren't yet paying that steep a political price for promoting clean energy or pursuing climate action while simultaneously promoting and pursuing policies that have the exact opposite ends. But at some point, that internal contradiction must become so obvious to the average citizen, or so untenable in the face of the damage it has done, that one way or another it collapses. And only when it does will the world have a real chance at closing off the widening gyre of loss that is coming for us.

Oddly enough, the difference between the world we have and the one we could have is buried in two contrasting modeling reports by two of the world’s most important energy-information organizations. Whereas the International Energy Agency projected that we’d hit peak fossil-fuel use in 2030, the U.S. Energy Information Administration came to a very different conclusion: It saw demand for fossil fuels rising through at least 2050. The difference between the two agency’s models is how they treat government policy. “It’s important to understand we are modeling exactly what’s on the books as it is written,” Michelle Bowman, a senior renewables analyst at the U.S. EIA, told me. If a policy is set to expire, the U.S. EIA treats it as expiring. It doesn’t take into account policies that countries have talked about but have had yet to implement. The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.

Policy, and only policy, appears to make that difference. It represents the choices that our leaders make about when to finally change course. Naughten, the Antarctic-ice scientist, reminded me that “climate is a spectrum; it isn’t an on/off switch.” Whenever we do make a different set of decisions, ones that make the math properly compute, we will be saving what we have left, preventing some layer of livability from being irrecoverably sloughed off and swept away.

They planned to take Kyiv in three days, the rest of Ukraine in six weeks.

More than 21 months later, Russian forces have withdrawn from half the territory they occupied in February of last year. At least 88,000 Russian soldiers are likely dead—a conservative estimate—and at least twice as many have been wounded. Billions of dollars worth of equipment, Russian tanks, planes, artillery, helicopters, armored vehicles, and warships have been destroyed. If you had predicted this outcome before the war—and nobody did—it would have seemed fanciful. No one would have believed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a professional comedian, could lead a country at war, that the democratic world would be united enough to help him, or that Russian President Vladimir Putin would endure such a humiliation.

Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union have achieved something remarkable: Working together, they have not only preserved the Ukrainian state, but stood up to a bully whose nihilism harms the entire world. Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe, provides thugs to support African dictatorships, and colludes with China, Iran, Venezuela, and other autocracies. From the beginning, Putin hoped the war would demonstrate that American power and American alliances can be defeated, not only in Ukraine but everywhere else. He still does, and for this purpose the war remains useful to him.

The fighting creates food shortages in Africa, thereby generating more unrest and more demand for Russian mercenaries. The war stokes discontent in Europe as well, giving pro-Russian parties a boost. Americans and Europeans view turmoil in country after country as a series of isolated conflicts, but Putin doesn’t think that Ukraine and the Middle East belong to different, competing spheres. On the contrary, since the conflict in Gaza erupted, he has intensified his relationship with Iran, invited leaders of Hamas to Moscow, and attacked Israel because of its links with the U.S., hoping that the spread of violence will decrease Western support for Ukraine. Iranian drones have terrorized Ukrainian cities; Iran, in turn, distributes Russian weapons to its proxies. Hezbollah is thought to have Russian anti-ship missiles that it could use against U.S. warships in the Mediterranean at any minute.

The allied fight against Russia in Ukraine has damaged Russia’s ability to project negative power in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. But despite his extraordinary losses, Putin still believes that time is on his side. If he can’t win on the battlefield, he will win using political intrigue and economic pressure. He will wait for the democratic world to splinter, and he will encourage that splintering. He will wait for the Ukrainians to grow tired, and he will try to make that happen too. He will wait for Donald Trump to win the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and he will do anything he can to help that happen too.

Right now, Putin’s bets are on the Republicans who repeat Russian propaganda—Senator J. D. Vance, for example, echoes Russian language about the Ukraine war leading to “global disorder” and “escalation”; Representative Matt Gaetz cited a Chinese state-media source as evidence while asking about alleged Ukrainian neo-Nazis at a congressional hearing; Vivek Ramaswamy, a GOP presidential candidate, has also called Zelensky, who is Jewish, a Nazi. Putin will have been cheered by the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, who is knowingly delaying the military and financial aid that Ukraine needs to keep fighting. The supplemental bill that he refuses to pass includes money that will keep Ukrainians supplied with the air-defense systems they need to protect their cities, as well as the fiscal support they need to sustain their economy and crucial infrastructure in the coming months.

The U.S. is supplying about a third of Ukraine’s financial needs—the rest comes from the European Union, global institutions, and the taxes paid and bonds purchased by the Ukrainians themselves—but without that help Ukraine will have trouble surviving the winter.  

Part of the Republican resistance to helping Ukraine fight an American adversary is simply the perverse desire to see President Joe Biden fail. Another part comes from the fear that Ukraine is not able to win. The Ukrainian summer counteroffensive did have some success, especially in the Black Sea, where a combination of drones and missiles has badly weakened Russia’s navy and forced some of its ships to leave the Crimean port of Sebastopol. But the progress on land was slow. Ukraine’s ability to inflict huge casualties on Russia was not enough to create a backlash, or a reconsideration, in Moscow. General Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian commander in chief, has recently spoken of the war as a “stalemate.”

Although Zaluzhny has also described, in detail, the technology he needs to move his army forward and break that stalemate, his statement has renewed talk in the West of a truce or a cease-fire. Some are calling for a cease-fire in bad faith. In fact, they want a Russian victory, or at least a defeat for Biden. Others, however, advocate a truce with the best of intentions. They believe that because Putin will never give up, the damage to Ukraine must be limited. Lately, I’ve heard several well-meaning people, all supporters of Ukraine, argue that this conflict could end the way the Korean War once ended, with the borders frozen on the current front line and the rest of Ukraine, like South Korea, protected by an American security guarantee and even U.S. bases.

All of these suggestions, well-meaning or otherwise, have the same flaw: A cease-fire, temporary or otherwise, means that both sides have to stop fighting. Right now, even if Zelensky agrees to negotiate, there is no evidence that Putin wants to negotiate, that he wants to stop fighting, or that he has ever wanted to stop fighting. And yes, according to Western officials who have periodic conversations with their Russian counterparts, attempts have been made to find out.

Nor is there any evidence that Putin wants to partition Ukraine, keeping only the territories he currently occupies and allowing the rest to prosper like South Korea. His goal remains the destruction of Ukraine—all of Ukraine—and his allies and propagandists are still talking about how, once they achieve this goal, they will expand their empire further. Just last week, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president, published an 8,000-word article calling Poland Russia’s “historical enemy” and threatening Poles with the loss of their state too. The message was perfectly clear: We invaded Poland before, and we can do it again.

In this sense, the challenge that Putin presents to Europe and the rest of the world is unchanged from February 2022. If we abandon what we have achieved so far and we give up support for Ukraine, the result could still be the military or political conquest of Ukraine. The conquest of Ukraine could still empower Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and the rest of Putin’s allies. It could still encourage China to invade Taiwan. It could still lead to a new kind of Europe, one in which Poland, the Baltic states, and even Germany are under constant physical threat, with all of the attendant consequences for trade and prosperity. A Europe permanently at war, an idea that seems impossible to most people in the West, still seems eminently plausible to the Russian president. Putin spent a memorable part of his life as a KGB officer, representing the interests of the Soviet empire in Dresden. He remembers when eastern Germany was ruled by Moscow. If it could be so once, then why not again?

The stark truth is that this war will only end for good when Russia’s neo-imperial dream finally dies. Just as the French decided in 1962 that Algeria could become independent of France, just as the British accepted in 1921 that Ireland was no longer part of the United Kingdom, the Russians must conclude that Ukraine is not Russia. I can’t tell you which political changes in Moscow are necessary to achieve that goal. I can’t say whether a different Russian leader is required—maybe or maybe not. But we will recognize this change when it happens. After it does, the conflict is over and negotiating a final settlement will be possible.

To reach that endgame, we need to adjust our thinking. First, we need to understand, more deeply than we have done so far, that we have entered a new era of great-power conflict. The Russians already know this and have already made the transition to a full-scale war economy. Forty percent of the Russian state budget—another conservative estimate—is now spent annually on military production, about 10 percent of GDP, a level not seen for decades. Neither the U.S. nor its European allies have made anything like this shift, and we started from a low base. Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute told me that, at the beginning of the war, the ammunition that the United Kingdom produced in a year was enough to supply the Ukrainian army for 20 hours. Although the situation has improved, as production has slowly cranked up all over the democratic world, we are not moving fast enough.

Secondly, we need to start helping the Ukrainians fight this war as if we were fighting it, altering our slow decision-making process to match the urgency of the moment. Ukraine received the weapons for its summer fighting very late, giving the Russians time to build minefields and tank traps—why? Training by NATO forces for Ukrainian soldiers has in some cases been rushed and incomplete—why? There is still time to reverse these mistakes: Zaluzhny’s list of breakthrough technologies, which includes tools to gain air superiority and better wage electronic warfare, should be taken seriously now, and not next year.  

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But the path to end this war does not only lead through the battlefield. We need to start thinking not just about helping Ukraine, but about defeating Russia—or, if you prefer different language, persuading Russia to leave by any means possible. If Russia is already fighting America and America’s allies on multiple fronts, through political funding, influence campaigns, and its links to other autocracies and terrorist organizations, then the U.S. and Europe need to fight back on multiple fronts too. We should outcompete Russia for the scarce commodities needed to build weapons, block the software updates that they need to run their defense factories, look for ways to sabotage their production facilities. Russia used fewer weapons and less ammunition this year than it did last year. Our task should be to ensure that next year is worse.

The West has already sanctioned Russia and put export controls on electronics and many other components necessary for the Russian defense ministry. Paradoxically, there may now be too many of these sanctions, which are difficult to keep track of and enforce, especially when materials go through third or fourth countries. Instead, we should target the most important supply chains, depriving the Russians of the specific machine tools and raw materials that they need to make the most sophisticated weapons. At the start of the war, the U.S. and its allies froze Russia’s foreign-currency deposits. The assets of many Russian oligarchs were frozen too, in the hope that this would make them more inclined to resist the war. With some exceptions, it did not. Now it’s time to take those assets and give them to Ukraine. We need to demonstrate that our commitment to the principle of Russian reparations for Ukraine is real.

But some of our money is needed too. Spending it now will produce savings down the line, and not just because we can prevent a catastrophe in Ukraine. By learning how to fight Russia, a sophisticated autocracy with global ambitions, we will be better prepared for later, larger conflicts, if there is ever a broader struggle with China or Iran. More important, by defeating Russia we might be able to stop those larger conflicts before they begin. The goal in Ukraine should be to end Russia’s brutish invasion—and to deter others from launching another one somewhere else.

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