Democrats finally passed climate legislation, does it matter?

Like the Kyoto Protocol before it, the drastically over-hyped Paris climate treaty has fallen victim to political and economic reality.

Now that President Donald Trump has officially pulled the United States from the accord, it is time to declare the entire Kyoto-Paris approach to global warming dead and buried. Instead of scrapping over the treaty’s corpse, this is an opportunity to try a new, better and more efficient approach to solving global warming.

Promoting his climate change film An Inconvenient Sequel, former US vice-president Al Gore likes to say that the nightly news has become “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations”.

He’s not the only one touting an apocalypse. In a much-shared story, New York magazine warned that famine, economic collapse and “a sun that cooks us” will happen as soon as the end of this century, as “parts of the Earth will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable”.

As 2026 begins, many of us have been taking stock of the year behind us and setting intentions for the one ahead.

For the world’s poorest, this was the year when the United Nations’ over-ambitious plan to solve every pressing global problem fell apart.

We should vow to be smarter, and do better, this year.