The climate crisis inflicted painful wounds to the US in 2022, but the year also brought hope that the country is finally prepared to confront disastrous global heating while also facing a tentative reckoning over its outsized role in causing it.
Historic climate legislation passed by Congress in the summer, coupled with an acknowledgment at the UN Cop27 talks in Egypt that developing countries suffering the worst climate impacts deserve new financial support from rich nations such as the US, offered some optimism during a year otherwise punctuated by disasters that point to an ominous climatic future for the world.
Here are the key 2022 moments of how the US grappled with the worsening climate emergency.
US finally passes climate legislation
“This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever,” Joe Biden said in August, before adding for good measure: “Ever.” After 18 months of seemingly fruitless negotiations, the US president got his cathartic moment when the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed Congress and the US joined most of the developed world in having legislation that deals with the biggest threat of our era.
The sweeping IRA will funnel more than $370bn over the next decade to advance clean energy projects, encourage people to buy electric cars, and wrest the initiative on renewables manufacturing and technology away from China.
The IRA was stripped of most of its “sticks” to force down pollution, thanks to the coal-tinged influence of Senator Joe Manchin, and is instead an assortment of “carrots” to encourage companies to go green. But, in all, analysts expect the bill will help slash US emissions by about 40% by 2030, based on 2005 levels.
This still won’t be enough. The White House and scientists say US emissions must be cut in half this decade to avert disastrous global heating, and additional laws and regulatory action on pollution from cars, trucks, industry and other sources will need to be cobbled together to reach this point.
But the summer breakthrough provided proof that the US was not a lost cause on climate and that the long-delayed task of scaling down planet-heating emissions was now within reach.
Gasoline prices become a national obsession
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a cascade of price increases around the world and, for a good chunk of the year, the primary political and social fixation in the US appeared to be the cost of gasoline.
Americans used to cheap gas, and forced by car-centric urban planning policies to rely heavily upon their vehicles for transport, were aghast to see the price of filling up increase to beyond $6 a gallon in some places in May. To counter Republican attacks over the issue, Biden took to boasting that the US was approving more domestic oil drilling than ever before, an awkward brag for a climate-focused president.
To the further chagrin of environmentalists, the administration is also speedily approving a glut of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants along the Gulf of Mexico, ready to export US fuel to European allies vulnerable to a gas supply controlled by the whims of Vladimir Putin. Critics point out that such infrastructure will lock in vast emissions for decades, at a time when the world can afford no more if it is to dodge climate meltdown.
Hurricane Ian devastates Florida
The two great disaster “seasons” that affect the US have been supercharged by a warming planet. In the west, there’s the wildfire season, which runs from summer until fall but more recently has been a year-round event. And in the east, there’s the Atlantic hurricane season, which peaks at roughly the same time.
This year has been a mercifully quiet one for wildfires, with favorable rainfall and winds sparing California some of the horrors of recent times. It looked like the hurricane season might be a relatively mild one, too, until Hurricane Fiona killed more than 30 people in Puerto Rico and left a third of the island’s population without drinking water in September.
Even worse was to come less than two weeks later, when Hurricane Ian became the deadliest storm to hit the US since Katrina in 2005, killing more than 150 people in Florida and plunging more than 2 million residents into power blackouts. Huge swaths of south-west Florida were inundated by flood water, trapping many people. Climate change increased the rainfall from Hurricane Ian by more than 10%, researchers subsequently found.
The Colorado River hits grisly new lows
While about half of the US is periodically suffering from far too much water – entire towns in Kentucky were submerged by flooding earlier this year, for example – the other half is increasingly desperate due to a lack of it.
The US west is in the grip of its worst drought of the past 12 centuries, and the past year has only heightened alarm over the state of the Colorado River, which 40 million people rely upon for their water. In July, Lake Mead, which is fed by the river and is the largest reservoir in the US, hit its lowest level since it was first filled in 1937, having dropped about 30ft in the past two years.
As the water level has plummeted, Lake Mead has given up some unexpected secrets. A second world war-era boat, a B-29 plane and at least six bodies – including human remains found in a barrel (which may well have been the handiwork of the mob) – have been discovered on the newly parched lakebed. The findings have provided a striking, and grisly, indication of how heavily drought now hangs over the US west.
Electric cars start to go mainstream
Shifting Americans from their gas-guzzling cars to electric alternatives is a central pillar of the Biden administration’s climate strategy, and in 2022 there were signs that the public is starting to warm to the idea.
While electric vehicles (EVs) still make up barely 5% of all car sales, the number of EVs purchased jumped 70% in the first nine months of the year compared with the same period in 2021, with buyers more likely to be women and tending to be younger than in previous years. In November, Ford, one of several car companies that have now pledged their future to electric, announced that its EV sales were up 100% from the year before.
A slew of new launches have shifted the image of the EV far from the days of the Prius. In April, the Guardian test-drove the new electric Hummer, a macho vehicle previously reviled by environmentalists for its pollution. Weighing the same as a small elephant, the Hummer is part of an ongoing fetish for larger cars that pose dangers to pedestrian and cyclist safety, but backers point out its arrival is a sign every corner of the car market is now going electric.
Even faster growth is needed if half of all US car sales are to be electric by 2030, as the White House hopes, and some in the auto industry are wary of obstacles such as supply chain snarls that have hindered the availability of key EV parts.
The rise of climate shaming
Greta Thunberg is perhaps the most famous non-plane passenger, due to the Swedish climate activist’s vow to not contribute to emissions by taking flights. Swedes have a word for this sort of guilt over flying – flygskam – and this year the trend of climate shaming caught on in the US.
Over the summer, there was a storm of controversy over celebrities taking short flights, often lasting less than 20 minutes, in their private jets. Drake, Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift were among those castigated, with Jenner called a “full time climate criminal” on Twitter. “These short flights have emissions that are small in relative terms but per person they are staggering,” as Nikita Pavlenko, fuels team lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation, said.
Around the same time, a climate activist group calling themselves the Tyre Extinguishers started to make their mark in the US, with groups heading out under the cover of darkness to deflate the tires of dozens of SUVs in places including New York City, San Francisco and Chicago to scold the vehicles’ owners over their outsized emissions.
“The amount of damage from a flat tire is nothing compared to climate change,” said one member of the group when the Guardian joined to witness a night-time deflation event. “Why do you need an SUV, especially in New York? It’s a vanity thing.”
The US finally embraces loss and damage at Cop27
The UN climate talks in Egypt were in many respects a frustrating failure, with no wave of new commitments to slash emissions, leaving the world still barreling headlong into disastrous global heating.
But the Cop27 talks did achieve a breakthrough on the contentious issue of “loss and damage” – the fallout suffered by developing countries from the climate crisis, which, they argue, should be compensated by the wealthy nations that caused most of the pollution.
The US has long opposed digging into this idea, due to worries about being sued as the world’s largest historical emitter. But in Sharm el-Sheikh, John Kerry, the US climate envoy, said the Biden administration was now “totally supportive” of a new loss and damage fund, acknowledging that the US has a “moral obligation” to act.
The fund was duly set up, on the condition that it has no weight of legal liability, and was embraced as an optimistic sign that the vast global inequities of the climate crisis are, at least in part, now being recognized.
Partisan battles set to rage in 2023
If 2022 was a year of some tangible, if imperfect, progress on the climate crisis, 2023 looks set to be bogged down in the sort of partisan warfare that has become familiar when the US political class is tasked with dealing with the issue.
While Democrats did better than expected in the November midterm elections, Republicans will still gain control of the House of Representatives in January and there is little sign the GOP is moving away from climate skepticism, or at least “delayism”. A House committee on the climate crisis is set to be disbanded, while the new conservative leadership has already talked about investigating green groups over alleged links to Chinese money.
While the IRA has been safely passed, Republicans will probably try to stymie its application, slowing its rollout. No new climate legislation is likely in the new congressional term and Biden’s attempts to regulate pollution via executive power may be struck down by the supreme court, which in June curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s response to the climate crisis.
All of this will waste more time, which is in dwindling supply. Scientists have warned there is now only a very narrow opportunity to keep within internationally agreed-upon temperature limits, and the challenge for the US will not get any easier. Emissions in the US are on track to be 1.5% higher in 2022 than the previous year, fueled by more frequent air travel and an economic uptick. Somehow, that picture will have to change in 2023.