What If We Stopped Pretending?

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

Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermo-nuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things w

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

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

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 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

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

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.