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Article 6
With a new president comes new environmental standards to fulfill, and they all have different ways of going about it. In this recent campaigning process, environmental issues of course took a backseat to the more pressing matters, such as security and money, but it was briefly touched on. Naturally, every candidate wants to say that they have solutions to better the state of the environment, such as minimizing greenhouse gases, but it's nothing but an empty promise until they implement a solution. Hopefully Trump has plans as to how to make our planet a healthier planet again.

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President Donald J. Trump.

Get used to the sound of that, my environment-oriented friends.
Is this end times for environmental progress or, more specifically, climate progress?

No.

The bad news about climate change is, in a way, the good news:

The main forces determining emission levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will be just as much out of President Trump's hands as they were out of President Obama's. The decline in the United States has mainly been due to market forces shifting electricity generation from coal to abundant and cheaper natural gas, along with environmental regulations built around the traditional basket of pollutants that even conservatives agreed were worth restricting. (Efficiency and gas-mileage standards and other factors have helped, too, of course.)

At the same time, the unrelenting rise in greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries is propelled by an unbending reality identified way back in 2005 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when he said, "The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge."

At the same time, as well, other fundamental forces will continue to drive polluted China and smog-choked India to move away from unfettered coal combustion as a path to progress. An expanding middle class is already demanding cleaner air and sustainable transportation choices - just as similar forces enabled pollution cleanups in the United States in the last century.

That's why the Paris Agreement on climate change will continue to register progress on emissions and investments in clean energy or climate resilience, but only within the limits of what nations already consider achievable (as others will be explaining in detail because the first post-Paris round of negotiations is under way right now in Marrakech).

Long ago, Jesse Ausubel, a veteran Rockefeller University analyst of global resource and environmental trends, asserted that, " in general, politicians are pulling on disconnected levers " at the intersection of energy and environmental policy.

As I wrote in 2014, that doesn't mean environmental agendas by politicians are useless, and environmentalism remains vital as a result. But what approach is most workable, particularly under a Trump administration with Congress in Republican control?

Is it end times for 20th-century-style us-them environmentalism?

That's up to the movement.

One response to a Trump presidency will be to double down with more pipeline blockades and other efforts to " keep it [carbon] in the ground."

I'm not saying there's no utility there. As I wrote on Monday, the Dakota Access Pipeline actions have brought much-needed attention to some longstanding grievances of Native Americans, including the diversion of environmental risks from the neighborhoods of more empowered constituencies onto Sioux lands and waterways. And revealing, and pressing, the banks financing the pipeline project is great.

But timing matters. Thinking ahead, for example, to the next congressional race, in 2018, I'd recommend avoiding the tactics used by those who tried to make the Standing Rock action as much about climate and carbon as Native American justice. With that in mind, I think it's worth including a section I cut from my Monday post - a section I held off running at the time following Mark Twain's dictum about the value of " unsent letters."

The section dealt with Bill McKibben's message in an Op-Ed article in The Times explaining " Why Dakota is the New Keystone." I felt it was a mistake for McKibben (an old friend from decades spent in parallel, but divergent, tracks on climate change) and others to make this a green litmus test for Hillary Clinton:

In the final hours of an incredibly consequential presidential race in which every vote - centrist or liberal - will play an important role, I was discouraged to see him use this moment to criticize Hillary Clinton's campaign for "ugly silence" in not jumping to the ramparts on this.
Is there any logic to this at the end of an extraordinarily divisive campaign in which polls are tightening? Let me know if you see it.

Late last week, the pressure from the left did elicit a response from the Clinton campaign, which was predictably, and woefully, parsed, as Evelyn Nieves describes in The Nation today.

Is forcing that statement a victory?

Should this have been made an Election Day issue?

I guess we'll find out.

We just found out.

Of course Clinton's defeat was a devastating political death of a thousand cuts - many self inflicted, others not. But this strategy of the green left was surely in the mix because it negated real concerns of working people facing economic uncertainty.

Obama recognized the importance of taking such concerns into account in hist great " South By South Lawn " climate conversation with the scientist Katharine Hayhoe and the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio:

I think it is important for those of us who care deeply about this - and Katharine is a wonderful example of the right way to do it - to not be dismissive of people's concerns when it comes to what will this mean for me and my family. Right?

So if you're a working-class family, and dad has to drive 50 miles to get to his job, and he can't afford to buy a Tesla or a Prius, and the most important thing to him economically to make sure he can pay the bills at the end of the month is the price of gas, and when gas prices are low that means an extra 100 bucks in his pocket, or 200 bucks in his pocket, and that may make the difference about whether or not he can buy enough food for his kids - if you just start lecturing him about climate change and what's going to happen to the planet 50 years from now, it's just not going to register. [Watch the video here.]

So what do environment-minded citizens, including journalists, do next?

There's plenty to do, much of which is continuing lines of effort that are already under way - as with communities and organizations and media identifying a host of problems, from Volkswagen's cheating to continuing leakage of methane from "super-emitter" sources in our oil and gas infrastructure.

I'll be trying to do what I've done for a very long time - hold people in power accountable for actions or inactions that can result in harm or betterment. There are green glimmers amid the most polarizing sound bites of the Trump campaign. One came in his responses to the questions posed by the Science Debate organization:

"Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels."

That's a statement I plan to hold him accountable on. I wrote on it in my piece on Trump's choice to run the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency - Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Last night, I sent Ebell a note asking for his new contact information. I'll be getting in touch as soon as he's up and running.

Here's another answer Trump's team provided to the Science Debate folks:

[T]he federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia. Though there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous.

I'll be keeping track on that front, as well, given the critical role invigorated basic research will have in accelerating a transition from the fuels of convenience to clean-energy choices that can work not only here, but everywhere.

Postscripts | First, keep in mind that I've restricted my comments here to environmental policies. I'm as troubled as anyone else seeking a welcoming, equitable, informed and enterprising America in what Trump's rhetoric has fueled and could do going forward if not modulated.

- Here's the latest Warm Regards podcast, focused on the implications of the election, laying out heartfelt concerns of a climate researcher (Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Maine), a deeply concerned meteorologist (Eric Holthaus) and yours truly:

- Gary W. Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan long focused on energy and climate, noted another important factor that will limit Trump's options and offer environmentalists a powerful prod:

It should be noted that carbon emissions were identified as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act (that was passed by Congress under the Nixon Administration and amended under Clinton). This finding was confirmed by the Supreme Court. All three branches of the federal government therefore agree that the Administration, through the E.P.A. must, by law, do as much as it can to reduce emissions to reduce damages and minimize human health risks. This is what the Obama Administration has been doing. Were the Trump Administration to ignore this legal imperative, it would be sued by the E.D.F., the Nature Conservancy, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and/or.... for being derelict in meeting their statutory obligations.

- Read Brad Plumer's analysis at Vox for some more on both the concern side and the hope side - ignoring the awful headline, which doesn't reflect what he wrote. (this was the hopeful tweet):

- Also read Jonathan Chait of New York University in New York Magazine:

- Tom Yulsman of the University of Colorado, Boulder, journalism program, posted this:

- David Roberts at Vox worries that " Trump's election marks the end of any serious hope of limiting climate change to 2 degrees."

- Here's a good piece by Joe Romm at Climate Progress noting that the trend away from coal is relentless, while the prospects for cabinet appointments and science funding are dire. The tweet has an early version of Trump's "first 100 days" vision:

Robert Stavins, a Harvard economist focused on energy and climate, wrote a short piece for The Times listing the many steps Trump can take to undo Obama's administrative steps, but noted a glaring inconsistency in Trump's own pledges:

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to "bring back" the coal industry by cutting environmental regulations. That may not be so easy. The decline of that industry and related employment has been caused by technological changes in mining, and competition from low-priced natural gas for electricity generation, not by environmental regulations. At the same time, Mr. Trump has pledged to promote fracking for oil and gas, but that would make natural gas even more economically attractive, and accelerate the elimination of coal-sector jobs.

Moving from sound bites to concrete steps may be Trump's biggest challenge.

But Paul Voosen at Science Magazine's news side does a good job summarizing what Trump can do here:

And now David Roberts and Brad Plumer have posted a super-sobering list of areas in which Republicans, both in Congress and the White House, can muck things up - particularly if Senate Democrats can't retain filibuster power:

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united nations framework convention on climate change

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Prospects for the Climate, and Environmentalism, Under President Trump

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President Donald J. Trump. Get used to the sound of that, my environment-oriented friends. Is this end times for environmental progress or, more specifically, climate progress? No. The bad news about climate change is, in a way, the good news: The main forces determining emission levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will be just as much out of President Trump's hands as they were out of President Obama's.

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Article 5
It is because of krill that the Antarctic system thrives, but they don't get the praise they deserve for sparking the aquatic food chain. There is concern about the numbers of krill however, because of the much bigger, stronger competition in species that prey on them, such as birds or fish. Some argue that this is all part of the natural order of things, while scientists, on the other hand, have been gathering to try and come up with a sound solution as to how to quell the steady decline of the krill population.

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SYDNEY, Australia - On an August morning aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel floating at the bottom of the world, Christian Reiss was listening for acoustic signals bouncing off krill, a pinkish, feathery-limbed crustacean that is the lifeblood of the Antarctic ecosystem.

It was the last month of the Southern Hemisphere winter, and conditions were good: There was no thud from sea ice pancakes bumping together to distort his tests in the clear waters of the South Shetland Islands, about 500 miles south of Cape Horn.

Dr. Reiss, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and his team were studying where krill live in winter.

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Scientists are trying to learn what melting sea ice means for the pinkish, feathery-limbed krill. Credit Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Low levels of sea ice gave them access to bays that in previous winters were closed. They wanted to know if a lack of sea ice, where krill gather to feed off the algae that live on the underside, was threatening the ocean's largest biomass. Krill form schools that can be miles long and miles deep.

Whales, sea birds, penguins, squid and seals all feed off krill. And they compete with commercial fisheries in the same waters, who sell the tiny creatures to be used as fish food or to make omega-3 fish oil for human use.

Dr. Reiss's findings are crucial. Two hundred and fifty scientists and policy makers are now gathered in Hobart, Tasmania, for an annual conference on managing Antarctica's marine life, including how to preserve the krill population. Dr. Reiss's five winter expeditions to the Antarctic showed that large numbers of krill remain in the open sea, in areas where fishing companies trawl for them.

At issue for scientists and policy makers is a measure that limits how much krill large commercial trawlers can vacuum from each of four designated zones of the South Atlantic. The rule, known as Conservation Measure 51-07, expires in November. It forces fishing companies to spread their fishing activity across larger areas to reduce the impact in any one zone.

Without it, penguins, sea birds, whales and other animals that feed on krill around the Antarctic Peninsula will be at risk of undernourishment or starvation.

"There is bound to be a thorough debate around it," Dr. Reiss said in a telephone call from Hobart. "Fisheries want to take all their catch from areas where they already fish. They don't want to take it from areas where they don't fish. That's the opposite of being precautionary."

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources is made up of the European Union and 24 other nations that have economic or research interests in the Antarctic.

The commission regulates fishing near Antarctica, and works by consensus. If one country blocks a measure, it fails. Last year, Russia blocked a proposal for two huge marine parks, each larger than Texas. Those parks, and a third, are back on the agenda during two weeks of closed-door meetings, which began Monday.

The Antarctic has long been an area of dispute for conservationists and commercial fishing interests. In 2015, 12 fishing vessels caught about 225,466 tons of krill in three of the designated areas around the Bransfield Strait. "We know the fisheries like to concentrate here," said Andrea Kavanagh, a director of the Southern Ocean Sanctuaries Campaign at Pew Charitable Trusts.

During the 1970s and 1980s more fishing took place off the east coast, when the Soviet Union trawled Antarctic waters. But fishing off the Antarctic Peninsula is more profitable. It is close to Chile and more easily accessible, and the weather permits fishing almost year round.

"We need to do a lot more to manage fishing," Ms. Kavanagh said from Washington before leaving for Hobart. She noted that krill are the mainstay of the diet of two threatened penguin species, the chinstrap and the Adélie.

Scientists estimate there could be up to 60 million tons of krill in the South Atlantic, between the tiny island of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula.

None say the krill harvest threatens the survival of the species. The Antarctic conservation commission limits the catch to 620,000 tons in a zone, and then fishing stops. The limit for total krill catch in the Scotia Sea, which lies between the tip of South America and the far reaches of the Antarctic Peninsula, is 5.6 million tons. Most fishing is concentrated in very small zones.

Dr. Reiss said estimates for krill biomass are based on summer surveys, but data is scant in winter, when fishing has increased. His five winter expeditions to the Antarctic revealed surprising numbers of krill remaining in the Bransfield Strait, where this year there was almost no sea ice.

"When there's an absolute lack of sea ice, that's a triple threat," Dr. Reiss said. "There's no food for the krill to eat and grow, there's little protection from predators because the krill can't hide in sea ice niches, and there's no physical habitat to keep them anchored and stop strong currents from taking them away." Scientists do not know enough to understand natural krill mortality rates at winter's end, but they worry fishing could harm krill populations in concentrated fishing zones, and rob natural predators of food.

A paucity of winter research has left scientists wondering why krill are in open water, said So Kawaguchi, a scientist from the Australian government's Antarctic division in Hobart, who has studied krill for more than 25 years. "We don't know exactly why krill migrate," he said. "We need to know a lot more."

Dr. Reiss said animals that had depended on the stability of the winter season could not rely on that anymore. "Every year is different now," he said. "Sitting on top of regional variations is this long curve of climate change that is going on."

The long-term outlook is uncertain, he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Uncovering the Secrets of Krill, a Linchpin of Antarctic Life. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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SYDNEY, Australia - On an August morning aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel floating at the bottom of the world, Christian Reiss was listening for acoustic signals bouncing off krill, a pinkish, feathery-limbed crustacean that is the lifeblood of the Antarctic ecosystem.

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Article 4
Mosquitoes occupy pretty much every portion of land, and are very hard to avoid in most parts of the world, the exception being in Iceland. It's strange because all of Iceland's neighbors are home to the pesky bugs, and have similar climates. It's not even that Iceland has climates that wouldn't be able to sustain mosquito life, which is why it's a mystery to many. Global warming raised the average air temperature there by two degrees, making it even more compatible for population there, but it remains uninhabited. Some theorize that it is it because of the chemical content of the soil that mosquitoes cannot survive in such a place. However, people are not unhappy about this, and are actually quite content with the fact that they don't have to put up with the mosquitoes. However, if mosquitoes eventually did go to Iceland, they wouldn't be too big of an issue, because they could be just another food source for fish.

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They suck your blood and buzz annoyingly around your ears. Their itchy bites can turn a festive barbecue miserable or ruin a bucolic walk in the woods. The most baneful ones spread diseases.

In almost every country in the world, mosquitoes are a menace.

Everywhere but Iceland, that is.

Iceland is one of the few habitable places on the planet that is mosquito-free, and nobody really seems to know why.

It's not nearly as cold as Antarctica, which is so frigid that mosquitoes (and people, for that matter) could never survive exposure to the elements there for long. Nor does Iceland lack the ponds and lakes where mosquitoes love to breed. And the insects are able to thrive in Iceland's neighbors - Norway, Denmark, Scotland, even Greenland - which only adds to the mystery.

The most likely theory proffered so far, scientists say, is that Iceland's oceanic climate keeps them at bay. When mosquitoes lay eggs in cold weather, the larvae emerge with a thaw, allowing them to breed and multiply. Iceland, however, typically has three major freezes and thaws a year, creating conditions that may be too unstable for the insect's survival.

Others have suggested that there may be something about the chemical composition of Iceland's soil and water that mosquitoes can't tolerate.

Whatever the reason, mosquitoes simply haven't been able to colonize the way they do elsewhere, said Gisli Mar Gislason, a biologist at the University of Iceland.

That may not be true much longer. Global warming has raised the average air temperature in the country about 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 20 years, and in that time, 200 new insect species have settled in Iceland that could not thrive there before, Mr. Gislason said: "If the warming continues, we may find mosquitoes in Iceland in the near future."

It wouldn't be entirely bad news. Mosquitoes would provide a new source of food for fish, especially Arctic char, one of Iceland's main exports. But otherwise, Mr. Gislason observed, "they will be a nuisance for everyone, just like they are all over the world."

For now, the only place in Iceland to find a mosquito is in the Icelandic Institute of Natural History. There, preserved in a jar of alcohol, is a lone specimen, captured by Mr. Gislason in the 1980s as it buzzed inside an airplane from Greenland that he had boarded at an Icelandic airport.

"I chased it around the cabin until I got it," he said. "It's the only mosquito I've ever found in Iceland."

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Europe's Mosquito-Free Island Paradise: Iceland

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They suck your blood and buzz annoyingly around your ears. Their itchy bites can turn a festive barbecue miserable or ruin a bucolic walk in the woods. The most baneful ones spread diseases. In almost every country in the world, mosquitoes are a menace. Everywhere but Iceland, that is.

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Article 3
Farmers are beginning to impact the environment negatively, due to their blatant disregard of Land Acquisition Laws. What they are doing is called 'land pooling', and what it does is allow for land owners to get back a share of developed land, while the state gets the remains. This leads to a vulnerable situation, because when all this land is owned by wealthy people, there is poor compensation. This leads to stalled projects, which not only affects the environment for the time being, but also is detrimental in a long-term sense. When land owners hand over their land to a government agency, it is converted into roads and begins to get convoluted with things such as water lines, completely destroying the environment in that area. The problem with that is that the farmers get a portion of their land back, as well as make a nice profit, so there is no incentive to stop the never-ending cycle.

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Article 2
Big companies are beginning to realize how big of an effect even the smallest amount of pollution that they put out can cause. While most are reluctant and certainly in no rush to change their wasteful and harmful habits, a trend has began and slowly more and more major companies all over are taking the state of the Earth and the environment into their own hands. We are striving for improvement, but are nowhere near the global standards. Some of the steps states are making are things like trapping pollutants and safely disposing of them underground. On a larger scale, some programs are being implemented such as the Energy Innovation Reform Project. Companies are putting some of their money into researching ways to become more environmentally friendly, while still accomplishing all the tasks that they need to.

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HAMBURG, Germany - On the edge of this northern German port city, the industrial giant Siemens is testing a way to offset the erratic nature of renewable power, by storing energy in hot rocks.

Off the coast of Scotland, an oil company will soon install the first commercial wind turbines that float in deep water, a potential clean-energy breakthrough that could be adopted around the globe.

And in Texas, an American company is about to test a new type of power plant that may generate electricity while cheaply capturing the emissions, allowing the climate-altering pollution to be pumped safely underground.

Around the world, energy innovation seems to be speeding up. Large historical forces are converging to create unprecedented turmoil and opportunity in what had long been one of the most hidebound industries.

The changes are coming just as governments have finally resolved, after two decades of failed efforts, to tackle the global climate crisis. The emissions that cause global warming have already fallen in some of the biggest countries, including the United States.

Yet none of it is happening fast enough.

Experts say that to forestall the worst effects of global warming, emissions need to drop by 80 percent or more globally by 2050, a mere 34 years from now. But at a global scale they are not falling at all, and the promises countries have made about the energy transition, even if kept, would get the world nowhere close to where it needs to be.

That means, experts say, that innovation in the field of energy will have to accelerate if governments hope to stave off catastrophe.

While the cost of renewable energy sources has plunged, it is still not low enough in most places to drive dirty energy out of the market. And while renewables have shown that they can replace large amounts of fossil fuels, many experts say they believe they cannot do the whole job and new technologies will be needed in coming decades to get greenhouse emissions to zero.

Progress on those new approaches has been halting, at best. So the future habitability of the Earth might depend on the answer to this question: How can innovation in the energy business be pushed into overdrive?

Not at All Like Your iPhone

Many people have a pretty clear idea about how innovation works - or at least they think they do.

After all, millions of people have one of the most dazzling fruits of modern technology, the smartphone, in their pockets. At the root of innovations like the smartphone and the flat-screen television are microchips that get ever faster, reducing the cost of gadgets even as their capabilities mushroom.

Now that almost everyone accepts that dirty energy is a problem, could it not be fixed with that same kind of innovation? It is a rational question, and only a few years ago some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley were asking it, too.

"Some of these venture capitalists had the mind-set that we'll get this stuff invented in the garage, and then we're just going to disrupt the whole sector," said Teryn Norris, a director at the PIRA Energy Group, a consultancy in New York.

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Till Barmeier, left, a Siemens project manager, and Maike Enders, a development engineer, checking equipment at the hot rocks test site near Hamburg. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

Billions of dollars poured into "clean-tech" investments. Most of them failed, and within a few years, investors were acknowledging they had misjudged the difficulty of the problem.

"They ran up against the hard realities of the energy sector," which does not remotely work the same way as most of the technologies emerging from Silicon Valley, Mr. Norris said.

To understand why, start with this: Though energy may appear to be a free market, with prices rising and falling as traders buy and sell oil and electricity, appearances are deceiving.

"The energy markets are among the most unfree markets you could find anywhere in the world," said Samuel Thernstrom, who served in the George W. Bush administration and now heads a think tank in Washington, the Energy Innovation Reform Project. "They are totally distorted at many, many levels."

The most obvious example is electricity. Because the delivery of electricity is a natural monopoly - multiple sets of wires would be a chaotic mess - state governments essentially took control of the electricity business a century ago.

They dictated what companies were allowed to build and set the prices they were allowed to charge, usually by lumbering, bureaucratic procedures that took years. The focus was on forcing the utilities to keep prices low while eking out modest returns on their investments.

Not surprisingly, electric utilities were among the least innovative businesses in the entire economy, spending next to nothing on research and development. Some aspects of the business have been reformed in recent years, but progress has been halting.

In less obvious ways, the market for oil and the fuels made from it has also been distorted. Much of the world's oil is controlled by government-owned national oil companies, some of them linked into a huge cartel, and even in the West a large fraction comes from public lands.

That means governments exercise a huge influence over supply; they can and do manipulate it for reasons having nothing to do with business principles.

On top of that, the oil industry benefited for decades from government favoritism, including big tax breaks in the United States and big consumer subsidies in other countries, that helped lock in a global dependency on oil.

As it became clear late in the 20th century that the emissions from coal, oil and natural gas threatened the world's climate, a cry for change arose.

But the tight linkages between energy companies and governments meant that if change was to come, it would only come as a result of strong public policies.

New stones at a Siemens site near Hamburg, Germany, where engineers are testing a method of storing excess energy in hot rocks for use at another time. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

That, in turn, set off a debate that is still underway: What, exactly, should those policies be?

For two decades, Europe has been the world's hothouse of experimentation in energy policy. Along the way, European governments have learned painful, expensive lessons.

The governments saw promise in technologies like wind turbines and solar panels, but realized these would never be able to compete with entrenched utilities unless the market for them grew large enough that manufacturers could benefit from economies of scale. They tackled that head-on, creating subsidies funded from the pockets of electricity consumers.

It worked, driving down the cost of renewables at a precipitous pace in recent years. Germany has pushed hardest among the large European countries and now gets a third of its power from various forms of renewable energy.

Adopting Renewable Targets

State governments in the United States also adopted renewable targets, though the United States is behind Germany, with about 13 percent renewable electricity, counting power from dams.

Despite their success in building the market, European governments were slow to adjust their subsidies, even as renewable power grew cheaper. Over time, the cost ballooned. The average German family is paying close to $300 a year on its electricity bill to support the green-energy push.

Among environmental groups, the subsidies and mandates are largely seen as a success.

That view is supported by a powerful argument: Economists have recognized that the falling cost of green energy is directly related to the size of the market. Every time the market for solar panels doubles, for instance, their cost falls by nearly 20 percent, according to research from a consultancy, Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

An employee monitoring the system at a Siemens site near Hamburg. The company will begin a larger test next year. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

So the preferred energy policy of the green groups is basically a more ambitious version of this established approach. If governments keep using subsidies and mandates to push for scale, they say they believe green energy will eventually be able to compete on economic grounds, giving society the tools it needs to reach low emissions by the middle of this century.

But many energy experts say they believe this will not be enough, and see an urgent need to speed the pace of research and development. Their concerns center on the limitations of renewable power. Because the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, solar panels and wind turbines are not entirely reliable sources of electricity.

Wind turbines in the sea are one answer. The strong, steady ocean breezes mean that far more power can be produced than from turbines on land. But putting huge machinery into the ocean is expensive, and for years European governments have had to offer high subsidies to get that industry off the ground.

Now, they are finding a better way.

Recently, instead of handing out fixed subsidies, they have been running "reverse auctions" for new wind projects. The company that asks for the lowest subsidy on a particular project gets the deal, and the subsidy.

The results have been startling, awakening fierce price competition among the developers of wind projects.

"We owe it to the people that are paying for this electricity to show that the industry is focused on getting the cost to them down," said Gunnar Groebler, who heads offshore wind development for Vattenfall, a huge European utility.

The European wind industry set price targets for the 2020s that it is already beating. Some of the companies have also set their sights on the United States, which has just built its first offshore wind farm, a tiny one off Rhode Island, but with some states planning far larger projects.

Offshore wind farms have been installed only in shallow water, but Statoil, the Norwegian oil company, and other companies are pursuing floating turbines that could work in many parts of the world where the sea floor drops off steeply. Statoil will soon start building the first commercial project of this type, a pilot off the coast of Scotland.

The growth of renewables is prompting a search for complementary technologies that could balance out the power fluctuations. The cost of large batteries is falling, and they are likely to play a role. But Siemens, the German giant that supplies gear for power projects all over the world, is looking for a cheaper approach.

On the outskirts of this city, it is testing a method in which surplus electricity would be used to heat up rocks, with the heat recovered later and used to generate power when renewable output is low. The energy could potentially be stored for days or weeks. The company will begin a much larger test next year.

"We already know it works," said Till Barmeier, the Siemens project manager, as he offered a tour of the hot rocks one recent afternoon. "The question is, does it work well enough?"

Limited Options

Even with all the recent progress, it is still unclear just how far renewable energy can go.

A few experts argue that the electricity system could go 100 percent renewable. But others reject that because of the intermittency problem, arguing that in the 2030s and beyond, society will need new huge power plants that can run most of the time without generating greenhouse emissions.

Workers aboard a vessel at the Riffgat wind farm. Experts say that while the cost of renewable energy sources has plunged, it is still not low enough in most places to drive dirty energy out of the market. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

If they are correct, only a handful of options are on the horizon.

They could include new types of nuclear power plants, designed so that it is physically impossible for them to explode or leak radiation. Another possibility is to burn fossil fuels, but to capture the emissions.

That is the approach that NET Power, a start-up that is being closely watched by leading experts, will test in Texas beginning next year. It has designed a power plant that may be able to generate electricity from natural gas, capture the carbon dioxide at low cost and allow it to be pumped underground, instead of into the atmosphere.

With big ideas like this, the basic problem is that building a large prototype plant can easily cost $1 billion or more, and private financiers are often reluctant to take the risk on unproven technology.

One solution, of course, is for governments to spend money to subsidize big demonstration projects. Many Americans probably imagine that quite a bit is being spent already. But the numbers are actually low. The federal budget devoted to new energy technology is on the order of $6 billion a year, less money than American consumers spend on potato chips.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft entrepreneur and philanthropist, has for years been prodding the government to step up these efforts. Last year, as the Paris climate deal was about to be completed, the Obama administration joined other countries in a pledge to double their spending on research and development by 2020, and Mr. Gates corralled private investors to support the effort.

It is not yet clear, though, whether Congress will honor President Obama's pledge.

Speaking recently in New York, the secretary of energy, Ernest J. Moniz, sounded optimistic. He said he believed the political parties could find common ground by focusing on energy innovation, and if they did so, "the American approach" would prevail.

What is that approach?

"We've got a problem," Dr. Moniz explained. "We recognize it. We solve it."

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Big Question on Climate Crisis: How to Inspire Innovation

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HAMBURG, Germany - On the edge of this northern German port city, the industrial giant Siemens is testing a way to offset the erratic nature of renewable power, by storing energy in hot rocks. Off the coast of Scotland, an oil company will soon install the first commercial wind turbines that float in deep water, a potential clean-energy breakthrough that could be adopted around the globe.

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After years and years of exploiting fossil fuels and using them at our leisure for convenience, it has been brought to our attention that the overuse is causing major issues with the environment. Big oil companies now realize that they need to alter the way they are operating in order to keep up with the changing Earth and available resources, as fossil fuels become more and more limited. Much like other environmental concerns and issues, Europe is responding well to this and adapting to the change, while America remains stubborn. However reluctant certain countries are, most are moving in the right direction, some just substantially slower than others.

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In a warming world, Big Oil doesn't look quite so big anymore.

A global glut of oil and natural gas has sent prices tumbling over the last two years, and profits are evaporating. Improving auto fuel efficiency standards threaten to depress oil consumption eventually, and fleets of electric vehicles are gradually emerging in China and a few other important markets.

Perhaps most troubling for oil companies over the long term is the goal - agreed to last December by virtually every country in the world at a climate conference in Paris - of staving off a rise in average global temperatures of more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, has said that to reach that goal, two-thirds of the global coal, oil and natural gas reserves still underground may never be burned without some improbable technological breakthrough in dealing with the carbon emissions. This position has been echoed by Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England.

The oil industry has experienced global crises, booms and busts for over a century, and few energy experts think it faces an existential threat in the immediate future. The world will still need oil and gas for decades, and normal declines in existing fields oblige further drilling. But change is almost certainly coming.

"Any energy company in the world that makes its strategy without considering climate change policies is making a major mistake," Mr. Birol said in an interview, "not only a major mistake for the climate but also for their own profits and for their own shareholders, because climate change policies represent a fundamental challenge to business as usual."

The International Energy Agency's projections of future global oil demand include one possibility in which demand could drop more than 20 percent from today's levels, to 74 million barrels a day by 2040, if measures are put in place to keep global warming at levels proposed at the Paris conference. As coal burning declines precipitously and renewable energy grows steadily, natural gas demand will rise only modestly by 2040 even as the global population grows, if the world truly wants to come to grips with climate change.

Not surprisingly, many oil executives view a different path as more likely. Exxon Mobil, for example, projects that global demand for oil will keep growing - by just over 13 percent from today, to 109 million barrels of oil a day by 2040.

At the same time, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and many other companies are investing heavily in natural gas as a lower-carbon answer to growing global energy needs. They view gas as a clean fuel of the future.

"We continue to believe fossil fuels will have a significant and important role to play for as far as we can see," Exxon Mobil's chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, said at the company's annual shareholders meeting in May.

Which way the world will turn is still in doubt. Most oil executives and independent experts agree that the ambitious Paris target will be challenging to reach, and that reduced burning of fossil fuels will require big technological and policy shifts.

Governments will probably need to be more proactive in deploying nuclear power, which is virtually carbon-free, many experts say.

Coal-fired power plants will need to be equipped with costly carbon capture and sequestration systems. Higher prices for carbon-based fuels are needed in countries like the United States to depress demand and encourage investments in nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration.

Advanced biofuels must be developed to produce renewable fuels without competing with food supplies. Better and cheaper batteries are needed to make electric cars affordable, while recharging stations need to be deployed far more widely.

All of those strategies are costly, politically charged or technically challenging. Big scientific breakthroughs will be needed.

Oil companies have tried to offer solutions to remain relevant. Exxon Mobil, for instance, has financed research into carbon capture and sequestration and lobbied for a carbon tax. Shell has been a big investor in Brazilian biofuels, while Chevron has long been one of the biggest investors in geothermal energy. The French oil company Total is making a major effort in solar power.

Some of the world's largest oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Saudi Aramco, pledged last week to jointly invest $1 billion over the next decade to develop systems to capture and store emissions of greenhouse gases and improve energy efficiency.

Several oil and gas companies have already moved quickly to reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from their exploration and transmission operations. Some farsighted executives have even suggested that their natural gas production could eventually be a major source of hydrogen for fuel cells because methane is hydrogen-rich.

But it's just a start. With their scientific and engineering prowess and capital muscle, many oil companies have the capacity to retrofit their business plans if and when they are forced to.

Jeremy Bentham, Royal Dutch Shell's vice president for global business environment, said Shell and other oil companies could adapt and prosper to meet the world's energy needs, which should continue to grow.

"Our portfolio mix would adjust over time," he said, "such that the level of the demand for oil would be met and the level of demand for overall energy would be met."

Mr. Bentham acknowledged that the world must leave some fossil fuels in the ground, but that the global community and not just oil companies must take action to reduce demand for carbon-based fuels.

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Heating units at Qatar Petroleum and Exxon Mobil's Golden Pass LNG terminal in Sabine Pass, Tex. Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and many other companies are investing heavily in natural gas as a lower-carbon answer to growing global energy needs. Credit Michael Stravato for The New York Times

"To have a demand at a much lower level you need a significant restructuring of mobility systems with more compact cities and with more public transport that can be electrified," he said. "You've got to have hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles that can take a longer range - a whole restructuring that isn't driven by energy production."

The restructuring of a new energy system is years if not decades away, and signs that important change is coming have been uneven.

The electric car market is growing slowly in the United States and most of Europe because of high costs and range limitations, although it is advancing faster in China. Toyota, Hyundai and Honda already offer hydrogen fuel-cell cars in select markets, and other companies are testing models that would emit nothing but water from the tailpipe, but major market penetration could be decades away.

Automobiles are becoming far more efficient, although cheap gasoline is causing a surge in consumer demand in the United States for pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles.

As for the petroleum industry, even as the price of oil has ticked up modestly in recent months, there are multiple signs of stress in a world of cheap hydrocarbons and rising environmental concerns. What once looked like a rush to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic has stalled. Investments in Canada's oil sands have slowed, partly as a result of low commodity prices, but also because environmentalists have been successful in opposing the Keystone XL and other pipelines.

Likewise, the hydraulic fracturing revolution that led to a frenzy of drilling in the United States is taking off in Argentina, but hardly anywhere else. The collapse in oil and natural gas prices has led to scores of bankruptcies, mounting debts and the slashing of exploration budgets. Attorneys general in several states are investigating charges that Exxon Mobil raised doubts about climate change while its scientists warned about the dangers of carbon emissions.

In this new world, European companies have been relatively more responsive to change. Many have embraced shareholder proposals to acknowledge the need to limit the rise in global temperatures and to test operations to see how they would perform in a carbon-constrained world. Such proposals have mostly been rejected by the American majors.

Statoil, the Norwegian national company, has agreed to accelerate its investments in renewable energy, announcing new investment decisions totaling more than $1 billion. Among these are the world's first floating offshore wind park and one of the world's largest venture funds dedicated to renewables. The projects in Statoil's renewable energy portfolio now have a combined capacity to power more than one million European homes.

"We recognize that only a certain amount of CO ₂ can be emitted to reach the 2-degree target," said Bjorn Otto Sverdrup, Statoil's senior vice president for sustainability. "Then you have to accept the idea of a carbon budget. You need to have ideas that are not only consistent with your organization's goals but also with climate science."

Independent energy experts are either skeptical of or only cautiously optimistic about the will of the oil companies to change.

"Oil companies are moving slowly but surely," Mr. Birol of the International Energy Agency said. "Some are moving faster, and some are moving much, much slower, if at all."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Big Oil Confronts Realities of a Global Climate Effort. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Big Oil Slowly Adapts to a Warming World

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In a warming world, Big Oil doesn't look quite so big anymore. A global glut of oil and natural gas has sent prices tumbling over the last two years, and profits are evaporating. Improving auto fuel efficiency standards threaten to depress oil consumption eventually, and fleets of electric vehicles are gradually emerging in China and a few other important markets.