This emphasis had made sense in the 1990s, when there seemed to be a good chance that the world would take collective action to curtail carbon emissions. By 2015, however, it was clear to me that collective action had failed and would continue to fail. Meanwhile, what remained of the natural world was in worse trouble than ever, as every nation pur

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I’ve been thinking about it as a race between feedback loops. It’s a race between the positive but bad feedback loops in the climate system and the feedback loops that we’ve been trying to cultivate politically, where you’re driving down the cost of technologies and building political will. And that’s the problem.