The Case for Climate

By Sriram Madhusoodanan, U.S. Climate Action Network

Growing up I moved a lot with my family. By the time I entered my teenage years we had moved seven times -- on average once every two years. Throughout this time there was one place that consistently felt like home: my grandparents’ house in India. Theirs was an idyllic place surrounded by verdant green rice paddies and bountiful trees of fruits like coconuts and bananas. It was, in a word, paradise. 

In 2005, I saw the film An Inconvenient Truth and it changed forever how I thought about global warming. As I saw animations of predicted sea level rise brought on by global warming, the impacts on my birth home of India and my adopted home in Florida were inescapable.

What concerned me most were the consequences of inaction. From the failure of the Indian monsoon to the drying up of the Himalayan glaciers and the submersion of coastal cities across the subcontinent, it was clear that the way of life for my family and the billions who call South Asia home would be irrefutably changed. I learned then that as a world, if we do not rise to the collective challenge before us, we inevitably face dramatic disruptions and even risk losing the places we love and call home; the places inscribed with our memories of childhood and which we endeavour to preserve for future generations.

Two decades later, things are not looking good. We are living through a historical era of climate disaster. Rapidly warming ocean waters are fueling ever more powerful and record-setting hurricanes and typhoons. We are overshooting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C - itself a compromise - and beyond which scientists have warned that we risk triggering potentially irreversible tipping points in the critical life-support systems that underpin all life on our planet. Already leading scientists are sounding the alarm that one of those tipping points has been reached - the widespread dieback of warm-water coral reefs - with others (e.g. dieback of the Amazon, collapse of major ocean currents, loss of ice sheets) on the brink.

We are all seeing climate change manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where we live, until we are the one filming it. In the first half of 2025, the costs of climate disasters in the U.S. have already reached historic levels. As I write this, Hurricane Melissa – one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded and made more powerful by warming oceans and climate change – is making landfall with deadly results.

Without immediate and drastic action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and specifically to phase out fossil fuels, our children and grandchildren will witness a drastically different and potentially inhospitable world for humanity. The last time the planet was 3 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels was 3 million years ago.

Faced with this stark reality, you would think that political leaders around the world would be striving to outcompete each other with the scale, boldness and vision of their plans for a climate just future that protects their people and measurably improves quality of life by end reliance on polluting, dirty sources of energy. 

Alas no. The political tragedy of our time is that, faced with a once in a lifetime opportunity to galvanize popular movements to fight for clean air and water and cheap, plentiful energy from renewable sources, most politicians have instead succumbed to the propaganda of the very greedy corporations that seek to continue global reliance on fossil fuels, even though it is the very thing that is killing our planet.

This in spite of the fact that, in 2025, we have reached multiple tipping points that will make a rapid and equitable transition off fossil fuels easier. Today, solar power and battery storage technology is cheaper and easier to deploy than ever before. And, in the first half of 2025, renewable energy resources accounted for 92% of new capacity added to the grid in the U.S., compared to a measly 8% of natural gas (the widely touted “bridge fuel” of the fossil fuel elite). Globally, this year a historic milestone was reached with renewable sources like wind and solar generating more electricity than coal. 

The story of these two parallel tipping points - one the irreversible negative impacts of climate change and the other the growing momentum of clean energy solutions that are both affordable and ready to scale - illustrates the case for climate action, especially at this moment.. 

Today, I am a father myself. As I think of the memories I am creating with my daughter, I wonder what sort of world we are leaving behind for her generation. Suddenly the timescales of climate predictions don’t feel so far off and remote. 

By 2050 - the midway point of our century - my daughter will be in her late twenties, older than I was when I sat down in that dark movie theatre and began to understand that addressing climate change is not so much a scientific problem as it is a political problem, one which can only be overcome if it is addressed through powerbuilding at a local, grassroots level and via global coordination. 

As I head off to COP30 in the coming days I do so with a renewed sense of urgency, hope, and gratitude. Urgency knowing that we have no time to spare in fighting for climate justice. Hope in understanding the solutions are available and ready for activation; and gratitude for the opportunity to join together and fight fervently for the future we all deserve with our members at the U.S. Climate Action Network and our global partners at Climate Action Network International. Together, I know we can drive a just transition from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy and, in doing so, build  a resilient and sustainable future for  people around the world, including my daughter.