14 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
has also illustrated how tough it is to
make significant cuts. With much of
the world under lockdown, global emis-
sions were around six per cent lower in
2020 than they were in 2019. Though
this drop was the largest on record, it
was still not enough to put the world
on track to meet the 1.5-degree-Celsius
goal set out in the Paris accord.
Whether the Biden Administration
can make a meaningful difference in
the climate’s future remains very much
to be seen. As the Washington Post re-
ported recently, before the ink was dry
on the President’s orders “the gas, oil
and coal industries were already mobi-
lizing on all fronts.” With the conser-
vative majority on the Supreme Court,
the Administration will have to be ex-
ceedingly careful in crafting new cli-
mate rules; otherwise, it could watch
the Court sweep away the very basis of
such rules. (The Court could revisit a
key 5–4 decision, Massachusetts v. En-
vironmental Protection Agency, which
requires the agency to regulate green-
house gases; Chief Justice John Rob-
erts dissented in that ruling.) There is,
unfortunately, no substitute for strong
environmental legislation, and Con-
gress hasn’t approved a major environ-
mental bill since 1990. With the slim-
mest of possible margins in the Senate,
Democrats may have trouble getting
even a modest climate-change package
passed. “The paper-thin majority likely
puts sweeping global warming legisla-
tion beyond reach,” a recent analysis by
Reuters noted.
Still, a critical threshold has been
crossed. For decades, politicians in Wash-
ington have avoided not just acting on
but talking about warming. “Years went
by in which you could scarcely get a
Democratic Administration to put the
words ‘climate’ and ‘change’ into the same
paragraph,” Whitehouse observed, be-
fore retiring his sign. “We quavered aboutpolling showing climate as issue eight,
or issue ten, ignoring that we had a say
on that outcome. When we wouldn’t
even use the phrase, let alone make the
case, no wonder the public didn’t see cli-
mate change as a priority.” Credit for
changing the conversation—for making
sure that there is a conversation—goes
to stalwarts such as Whitehouse, and to
a new generation of climate activists,
and to the voters who watched Califor-
nia burn and southwestern Louisiana
flood, and then flood again, and pushed
climate change up the agenda. In a re-
cent Morning Consult/Politico survey,
“addressing climate change” ranked just
behind “stimulating economic recovery
from COVID-19” and “health care reform”
as a priority.
Talking isn’t going to solve the prob-
lem, but it’s a start. “We’ve already waited
too long to deal with this climate crisis,”
Biden said last week. “It’s time to act.”
—Elizabeth KolbertDEPT.OFAGITPROP
KEEPINGCOUNT
A
t noon on the bright, frigid day be-
fore the Biden-Harris Inaugura-
tion, a small, masked group assembled
outside Playwrights Horizons, the Off
Broadway theatre on West Forty-second
Street, for the unveiling of an art work
with overtones of resistance. The piece,
by the street and subway artist Jilly Bal-
listic, is the first in the theatre’s new pub-
lic-art series. On the sidewalk, Ballis-
tic, in a trenchcoat, with her hair in an
elegantly sculpted Mohawk, stood near
Adam Greenfield, the theatre’s artistic
director, who wore a retro parka. “This
is the first time we’re meeting!” Greenfield
said, smiling. He created the series with
his associate artistic director, Natasha
Sinha; the costume and set designer
David Zinn; and the artist Avram Fin-
kelstein, a co-founder of the Silence =
Death project, in the early AIDS-activ-
ism era. Next door, a bistro, Chez Jose-
phine, played Billie Holiday’s “I Wished
on the Moon” to passersby.
Two Playwrights Horizons employ-
ees approached the theatre’s plate-glass
windows and peeled off brown paper,
uncovering a sign that said, in huge letters,
“With great power comes no account-
ability.” Next, they uncovered a wide vi-
trine displaying a dollar-bill replica the
size of a billboard, with a speech balloon
graffitied beside George Washington’s
face. “Imagine 352,464 of these,” it said.
“Now imagine they’re bodies.”
Ballistic, whose work in subways in-
corporates graffiti and custom-made
M.T.A. service posters, had written the
number, the U.S. Covid death toll, on
January 5th. She came up with the ac-
countability slogan before the pan-
demic. “I never would have imagined
this,” she said. The workers opened the
vitrine, and Ballistic, Sharpie in hand,
paused, like a gymnast gathering focus.
She drew a line through “352,464” and
wrote, beside it, “399,053.”
Two masked construction workers
in hard hats, carrying bags from Sticky’s
Finger Joint, walked up. “Bro, I’m going
to stand there, and you’re going to take
a picture of me, O.K.?” one said to the
other, and posed. His name was Eric
Ashford. (“Like Ashford & Simpson,”
he said, referring to the R. & B. duo.)
He looked at the dollar bill. “I think it’s
wonderful,” he said. “There’s a lot of
things going on in the world right now,and anything that gives some type of
explanation, or invokes thought ... ” H e
trailed off. “This will invoke thought.”
He’d been affected by Covid. “I know
people who have passed away—class-
mates, people I went to school with,”
he said. “This whole thing is like an ac-
tual real movie that we live in. You just
got to keep pushing forward.”
When Greenfield was offered the
job at Playwrights Horizons, in 2019,
he had already “spent a bunch of time
worrying and complaining and bang-
ing fists on tables about the state of the-
atre,” he said, a few days before the un-
veiling, on a Zoom call with Finkelstein.
“I rented a place in Barcelona for six
days, and I brought a few books.” One
of them was Jane Jacobs. “How do we
engage with the city better?” he asked.
“If we believe in new writing, which is
what Playwrights Horizons is for, then
to what end?” Then the pandemic hap-
pened, and Finkelstein called. He and
Zinn had been thinking about “what
to do with these muted public façades
all over New York,” Finkelstein said,
and had immediately thought of Play-
wrights Horizons: “When Adam started
saying things like ‘What is theatre for?,’
I knew it was right.”
Finkelstein went on, “I am the elder
statesman of agitprop. In the early days