Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?

I am a leftist focused on capital’s ravaging of our bodies, our democratic structures, and the living systems that support our collective existence.

it was trying to think through how to do the needful in the biosphere’s time of crisis, while orthodox economics failed to rise to the occasion, and stayed focused in its old analysis of capitalism, as if capitalism were the only possible political economy, thus freezing economics as a discipline like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car.

We need to move from a world in which environmental and social capital are essentially free—or at least someone else’s business—to a world in which the need to operate within environmental limits within a thriving society is taken for granted.

The overwhelming threat of climate change has amplified the sense that global capitalism is out of control or that the best we can hope for is to avert catastrophe.

I take to heart Tim Garrett’s excellent work,7 indicating that only the collapse of industrial civilization will prevent runaway climate change. And there are many, many other good reasons to terminate this set of living arrangements. According to a United Nations report from August 2010, we’re driving to extinction 150 to 200 species every day. Th