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US Climate Bill Keeps Hope Alive for Halting Warming at 1.5°C

What has been a long-shot hope of the Paris Agreement remains in play: “We’re putting the US on a path to keep that goal possible.”

Low water levels on the Colorado River in Searchlight, Nevada.

Low water levels on the Colorado River in Searchlight, Nevada.

Photographer: Roger Kisby/Bloomberg

With climate legislation passed through Congress on Friday, the US is on the brink of reviving a long-shot global hope: to limit warming temperatures to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit).

The 1.5°C warming limit was enshrined into the Paris Agreement in 2015 as a shared goal of world governments. It’s a crucial threshold beyond which heat waves, rain, drought, flooding and sea level rise become increasingly intolerable. But it’s a goal that has become seriously imperiled over the past seven years — in no small part due to the limited efforts of the US, one of the largest single sources of greenhouse gas.