Please talk me out of a grim climate crisis analysis and forecast

As I revise Universities on Fire I have been mulling over one way of looking at the climate crisis in recent history and the near future. It’s a grim view, specifically of the United States, and yet I can’t shake it. Please help talk me out of it.

Fair warning: I’m writing this in a hurry, caught between competing deadlines, so it’ll be a short post without a ton of links or development.

I’ll explain this shortly.

Let’s start with the American partisan divide over the climate crisis. Roughly speaking the Republican party either doesn’t think it matters, or thinks it’ll happen but humans didn’t do it and the government should stay out of the issue, or considers it a conspiracy/scam. In contrast the Democratic party has been increasingly interested in viewing climate change as a dire threat and wanting to do something about it.

So when Americans elected Trump and gave both houses of Congress to the Republicans in 2016, we were set for a climate crisis retreat on the political side. (This is one reason I saw my friend Bill McKibben campaigning fiercely for Hillary Clinton that year.) While civil society may have become more interested in the climate crisis, government was either stymied or retrograde. So that’s four years lost.