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

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

The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that there’s stil

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

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.

It seemed to me that, given the bleakness of our predicament, the problem of hope was crucial—a world-sized version of the problem of maintaining hope in the face of individual mortality—and that genuine hope insists on honesty and love. On honesty because hope is an investment like any other, best made with a clear eye. And on love because, withou

In a sense, I’d asked for it, by implying that the establishment is committed, in its own way, to denial of climate reality.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became f

A lot of people are dismayed by the erosion of civil discourse, are impatient with the obsolete promises of politicians and activists, are eager to make sense of our desperate situation, and are looking for ways to sustain some kind of hope.