If ISIS Had a Bomb That Could Put the East Coast Underwater…

Global leaders tackle another threat.

Kent Weakley/Shutterstock

LE BOURGET, France—On the first of my two flights this weekend, I sat next to a defense contractor from Kentucky. He was on his way to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a project that sounded at once too mundane and too secretive to ask him to explain. The forecast up there was calling for temperatures to dive past 20 degrees below zero. He told me he planned to go straight from his next plane to a heated bus to the project to his heated hotel. Then he asked me where I was going.

“Paris,” I told him.

He mulled this over. “Well, you be careful,” he finally offered, reassuringly.

I knew what he meant. It had been a little more than two weeks since 130 people were killed in simultaneous attacks on restaurants, a concert hall, and France’s national soccer stadium, followed by police raids against the jihadists said to be responsible. So, like my seatmate, when most Americans think of Paris right now, they think of ISIS cells and flag-waving solidarity.

But I wasn’t coming to Paris to cover terrorism. I was coming to cover something that all of us have heard a lot less about in recent weeks, but whose stakes are far more important: a last-ditch effort by the world’s leaders to stop the most dangerous effects of climate change.

Read the rest at The New Republic.

 

from Climate Desk http://ift.tt/1QcaXsB

Global leaders tackle another threat.

Kent Weakley/Shutterstock

LE BOURGET, France—On the first of my two flights this weekend, I sat next to a defense contractor from Kentucky. He was on his way to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a project that sounded at once too mundane and too secretive to ask him to explain. The forecast up there was calling for temperatures to dive past 20 degrees below zero. He told me he planned to go straight from his next plane to a heated bus to the project to his heated hotel. Then he asked me where I was going.

“Paris,” I told him.

He mulled this over. “Well, you be careful,” he finally offered, reassuringly.

I knew what he meant. It had been a little more than two weeks since 130 people were killed in simultaneous attacks on restaurants, a concert hall, and France’s national soccer stadium, followed by police raids against the jihadists said to be responsible. So, like my seatmate, when most Americans think of Paris right now, they think of ISIS cells and flag-waving solidarity.

But I wasn’t coming to Paris to cover terrorism. I was coming to cover something that all of us have heard a lot less about in recent weeks, but whose stakes are far more important: a last-ditch effort by the world’s leaders to stop the most dangerous effects of climate change.

Read the rest at The New Republic.

 

from Climate Desk http://ift.tt/1QcaXsB