Fossil fuels actually have been enormous for human flourishing. They have unlocked a tremendous amount of prosperity and wealth and health for people,

you know, especially in Western Europe and North America, but all around the world as well.

And, do you know what? You know, so did the typewriter.

So did oil lamps. They were tremendous technologies. They did a ton of good and then we developed

better stuff. And that's what we need to do in order to fight climate change in order to get to where we need to be.

Hello and welcome to why is this happening with me your host Chris Hayes. It's the new year. It's the new year. It's January 2024 and we've got the data in from

2023 about the global temperature

and you'll never guess what we learned,

which is that it is indeed the warmest year on record.

Now that is a thing you've probably heard before. We've had a lot of

warmest years on record recently. 2023, we still don't have all the data in but looks like it's going to

break the record by quite a bit and that's not surprising

given the fact that we have been pumping carbon in the atmosphere since you know at the beginning of the

Industrial Revolution that that carbon is warming the atmosphere and we are on track for warming the entire global temperature by at least probably 2 degrees Celsius and likely more.

And the question of just how hot it gets is the existential struggle,

the civilizational struggle of our time. So that's the bad news and the bad news in climate is easy to find.

There was also a lot of interesting I think promising climate developments in

2023 because there have been incredible

incredible leaps in both the development of clean energy and the

deployment of clean energy. We're seeing the Inflation Reduction Act climate provisions, which are the

largest package of climate provisions ever in American history, start to be deployed. We're seeing

the acceleration of the deployment of all kinds of

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