What If We Stopped Pretending?

The immigration pressure in the future will make the recent refugee crisis in Europe look like a Sunday picnic. I fear the outcome will be very ugly.

the Green New Dealers, the Fridays for Future people. I hold them to a higher standard of honesty, and I want them to expand their definition of being green to include what we’re doing to the other species on the planet; to talk a little less about climate and a little more about solvable problems. So far, only Extinction Rebellion has been willing

it’s an instance of the dark comedy of climate change that anyone can seriously imagine that the world will happily renounce the lifestyle benefits of economic growth. The game is over. Petro-consumerism won.

to even have a chance of hitting that figure, every country in the world would have to entirely remake its infrastructure and economy in the next ten years. Maybe Sweden can become a net carbon non-emitter by 2030. But people in France are rioting over a minor gasoline tax, people in Trump America are in love with their pickup trucks, and let’s not

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

the fact that climate is now a dominant theme in Europe doesn’t mean that Europe has suddenly become environmentally conscious. European countries continue to wreak havoc on the natural world—through a sterilizing agricultural policy, through the destruction of fisheries, through forestry mismanagement, through wildly unsustainable levels of legal

I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me.

I’m not alone in having reached this conclusion. But there continues to be a reluctance to broadcast it. Some climate activists argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar lifestyles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. The