U.S. climate policy has failed, according to the leader of a new initiative that offers an approach to fix it.

The Climate Realism Initiative launched Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations assumes global warming will blow past internationally agreed targets and asserts that the U.S. should prepare for that increasingly dangerous future.

It’s an approach that seeks to debunk what the initiative’s director, Varun Sivaram, calls “magical fictions,” while emphasizing the catastrophic effects that rising temperatures could inflict on the U.S. economy and the American people. He hopes the new approach can help insulate climate policy against swings between political parties.

Sivaram said the fictions include the idea that global climate targets are achievable, that climate risks will not be cataclysmic for the U.S. and that cutting U.S. climate pollution will meaningfully affect the trajectory of global warming.

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