How to Misunderstand the Climate Crisis

exacerbate the inequitable distribution of suffering. There is no question that the climate is going to change, and bring with it a lot of suffering. The question is how we navigate it.

Its relentless trajectory: To bring it on, all we have to do is, um, nothing. Its overwhelming complexity: To fix it, not only do we have to do something, but, as Naomi Klein has said, we pretty much have to “change everything” about how our economy and society operates. Its asymmetries of power: Those of us most historically responsible for causin

The consequences of catastrophic climate change are daunting, almost too terrifying to contemplate, and denial can help us through it.

The climate crisis isn’t a matter of intelligence—an average eighth-grader can understand what our carbon emissions are doing to the atmosphere. What makes the crisis so daunting is that it can be understood in a variety of ways: as a failure of global governance, a failure to properly price carbon emissions, a contest between rich nations and poor

possible to observe the unfolding human attack on nature with horror, be determined to do whatever you can to stop it, and at the same time know that much of it cannot be stopped, whatever you do? Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further;