If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to

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.

you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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.