In the daunting math of climate action, individual choices and government policies aren’t adding up.

Solar
panels are being nailed to rooftops, colossal wind turbines bestride
the plains and oceans, and a million electric vehicles are on U.S. roads
— and it isn’t enough. Even if the world did an unlikely series of
about-faces — halting deforestation, going vegetarian, paying $50 a ton
carbon taxes, boosting energy efficiency, doubling car mileage, and more
— it would not be enough.

“There’s no silver
bullet,” said Andrew Jones, co-founder of the modeling firm Climate
Interactive. “There’s silver buckshot: many actions in many domains.”

As
the 24th U.N. conference on climate change kicks off this week, a
steady drumbeat of scientific reports have sounded warnings about
current climate trajectories. One warned of
the need to curb global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — 2.7 degrees
Fahrenheit — over preindustrial levels instead of the widely accepted
target of 2 degrees Celsius. Another warned
of the growing gap between the commitments made at earlier U.N.
conferences and what is needed to steer the planet off its current path
to calamitous global warming.

If it sounds downbeat, that’s because it is.

‘A kind of dark realism’: Why the climate change problem is starting to look too big to solve