2023 Climate power rankings: The year heat came to stay

By Mark Gongloff

For most of the centuries humans have despoiled Earth’s climate, the consequences have felt more like a “tomorrow” problem than a “now” problem. That delusion lost much of its power in 2023. Instead of passing the nightmares we’ve created on to children and foreigners, we were increasingly dealing with them ourselves.

Deadly heat waves gripped the world from Beijing to Phoenix. Corals cooked to death right on their reefs. Seeming climate havens caught fire or flooded. Wildfire smoke made people sick from hundreds of miles away.

The silver lining? It’s harder than ever to deny the reality of climate change and the need to make sure it doesn’t get too much worse. This was the hottest year in recorded human history, but climate scientists reminded us, a la Homer Simpson, that it was actually just the hottest year in recorded human history so far. We’ll remember it fondly as one of the pleasant ones.

The good news is that humans still have the power to decide how much less pleasant things will get. The bad news is that humans aren’t so great at “deciding.” Thus we got yet another year of competing forces wrangling over the planet’s future. Some of those forces even wrestled with themselves because, of course, many of us are part of both the problem and the solution.

What follows is the definitive ranking of the biggest players in an eventful 2023 for the climate. For better or worse.

#10: The Carbon Offsets Comeuppance

Carbon offsets, the indulgences that polluting companies and people buy to make themselves feel or look better or both, have been losing favor for years. The elevator pitch against them: They often don’t, how do you say, offset carbon. But a flurry of damning investigations this year by Bloomberg Green and others exposed just how deep the rot might go. People are considering regulation or alternatives. The climate can only benefit.

#9: Taylor Swift

The least-escapable musical artist of our time apparently has a terrible medical affliction that forces her to constantly fly on private jets. She produces nearly 1,200 times the average person’s greenhouse-gas emissions each year with her private-jetting. But her Eras tour juggernaut was derailed by overwhelming heat and humidity in Brazil, reminding Swift and her legions of fans that the planet is roasting and we shouldn’t Tolerate It (Taylor Swift reference).

#8: India

One of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies also has the world’s third-biggest carbon footprint. The country trumpets big ambitions for renewables. It could set an example of how to develop an economy without ruining the planet. But this year it failed to meet transition goals while burning more coal than ever.

#7: Elon Musk

On the plus side, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive officer spent 2023 slashing electric-car prices, bringing them tantalizingly closer to the level where consumers who weren’t made out of money could reach them. He struck deals with oil companies and other automakers to share EV charging stations. On the minus side, he dabbled in antisemitism at his side gig and inflicted the dangerously heavy, aesthetically dubious, traction-challenged Cybertruck on the world, turning off a generation of potential EV buyers. So, yeah, many contrasts.

#6: Fossil Fuels

The former champion of climate change has lost a step lately. But you still can’t sleep on Big Oil. It has oceans of cash and influence, and also oil. It flooded the COP28 climate talks in Dubai with enough lobbyists to be the world’s third-most-represented nation. More dangerously, it has somehow convinced serious people that carbon capture is a thing. The expensive, energy-burning technology is far from ready to operate at scale, but hey, at least it can keep fossil fuels in business for another century.

#5: Mia Mottley

The prime minister of Barbados may be the most important climate player you’ve never heard of. She was almost as ubiquitous as Big Oil at COP28. Her plan for climate financing, the Bridgetown Initiative, has basically set the agenda for global talks. Lofty energy-transition dreams won’t become reality without copious piles of money, and Mottley’s vision and leadership are helping to painstakingly pry open rich countries’ wallets.

#4: Friederike Otto

If you are being punched repeatedly in the face, you might want to at least know who is doing the punching. This year, the group Otto co-founded, World Weather Attribution, explained how everything from Canadian wildfires to East African droughts to Taylor Swift’s Brazilian heat wave were made more likely by climate change. The knowledge should motivate us to fight back.

#3: Interest Rates

In a bid to slow the economy and fight inflation, the Fed raised interest rates 70,000 times. This didn’t really slow the economy. It might have fought inflation. It definitely made buying a house impossible. It also made it deeply unattractive to finance renewable-energy projects, which require heaps of capital up front. Just when we should be pumping more cash into the transition from fossil fuels, the Fed’s magic credit fountain ran dry. So did a lot of clean-energy investments.

#2: Sultan Al Jaber

It says a lot about 2023 that the head of the state-run oil company of a country groaning with oil riches (United Arab Emirates) managed to negotiate the most aggressive anti-fossil-fuel statement ever produced by a UN climate confab. But here we are. Many contrasts. Lest we get too carried away, we should remember that OPEC cheered the COP28 result. And Al Jaber’s oil company has no plans to quit oil. Still, fears that his presidency of COP would be a complete disaster were unfounded.

#1: ‘Gobsmackingly Bananas’ Heat

Please don’t make me run through all the superlatives again. Thanks partly to the El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific but mostly to decades of warming, global temperatures in 2023 smashed record after record, month after month. This year will likely be the first to average 1.5C above pre-industrial averages by some measures. We briefly touched 2C in November. Heat is deadlier than hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, floods or other natural disasters, but it also makes all of those things stronger or likelier or both. And we’ve invited it to stick around for the long haul.

Honorable Mentions: Wind power, coal, China, Russia, the US, Al Gore, John Kerry, Xie Zhenhua, Rishi Sunak, the Sycamore Gap tree, gas stoves, ancient zombie viruses.