As someone who covered climate change a decade ago, I feel like the rest of the world is only just catching up to the following realities:

1. Avoiding truly epic amounts of climate change is technically feasible but economically and politically totally infeasible

2. Accepting that we are going to return our planet's climate to a state not seen in tens of millions of years is important. Because it's the truth. Anyone who wants to tell you differently is trying to sell you their ideology.

3. Knowing the earth is going to undergo multi-degree warming is no excuse not to decarbonize our energy system. We needed to do that anyway. And the less warming, the better.

4. Talking about really serious amounts of adaptation is not accepting defeat, it's grappling with reality. And you'd be surprised how having to actually spend money to deal with the coming warming will help people also accept (3)

5. There are no easy solutions. Geoengineering is extremely problematic. Carbon draw down of any scale is still a fantasy. We are going to have to both adapt and mitigate. Getting serious about it will probably take generational turnover in the power structures of this country.