Welcome to the President's inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boy's Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S.

Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is climate change realism.

With and discuss whether and how the United States can meet the challenge that climate change poses is Varun Siveron.

Varun is a senior fellow for energy and climate here at CFR and the director of the Council's Climate Realism Initiative.

A Rhodes Scholar, he holds a PhD in condensed matter of physics.

From 2021 to 2023, he was the managing director for clean energy and senior advisor to John F. Carey,

the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. Verroon then served as chief strategy officer at Orsted, a Fortune Global 500 company that is the world's largest producer of offshore wind energy. An accomplished author,

his 2018 book, Taming the Sun, which examines the future of solar energy, was named by the

Financial Times as one of the best books of the decade.

Varroon's latest piece for CFR.org is titled, We Need a Fresh Approach to Climate Policy.

It's Time for Climate Realism.

Varun, thank you for joining me on the president's inbox.

Jim, thank you so much for having me.

Today, Verun, is Earth Day, which is why I wanted to have

you on to talk about where we stand in the effort to combat climate change. Tell me, where do we

stand? Jim, happy Earth Day, or perhaps I should say not a very happy Earth Day to you because

we don't stand in a particularly good situation when it comes to the

state of the planet. And that's the reason that we launched this climate realism initiative.

It was first and foremost to end what I call magical thinking about the state of our efforts

to confront climate change. Today, humanity is on track to blow through our climate targets,

the targets that we agreed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Those targets, which set two

degrees Celsius as the warming limit that we would tolerate for the average temperature increase

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