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But nothing will change, and, as a result, everything will change. There will be large-scale crop failures. The Greenland ice sheet will start to collapse—it may already be collapsing—and, owing to sea-level rise in some places and desertification in others, large swaths of the globe will become uninhabitable.
the “invisible hand” always grasps for more. If it’s not more oil, it will be more lithium to build batteries, and if it’s not more lithium, it will be more cobalt, mined from the bottom of the sea.
DSM
“The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological catastrophe, we need to level down”
How are we going to build a whole new economic system if we can’t even enact a carbon tax?
In many parts of the world, it’s now cheaper to put up turbines than it is to operate an existing power plant that burns natural gas.
the Alia had gone through about twenty dollars’ worth of stored electricity. To travel the same distance, the Cessna had burned about six hundred dollars’ worth of jet fuel.
The associated carbon emissions accounted for roughly eight per cent of the global total—more than aviation and shipping combined.
little blocks of damp CarbiCrete were reacting with carbon dioxide; instead of releasing the gas, the blocks were soaking it up.
three hundred and fifty billion dollars on climate initiatives,
It relied almost entirely on incentives rather than penalties.
If it does what it’s supposed to, it will further reduce the cost of clean energy and spur the growth of whole new industries.
Americans are consuming roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day.
It’s as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings draped around our homes, burning 24/7.
annual emissions in the U.S. run to sixteen metric tons of CO2 per person.
atmospheric imperialism.
India effectively skipped fixed-line phones and went straight to wireless, a process that’s become known as leapfrogging.
The North grew wealthy by burning fossil fuels. It could use that wealth to help other nations leapfrog to renewables.
narratives that “empower people to act.” Such narratives tell a “positive and engaging story.” They “articulate a vision of ‘where we want to go’ ” and outline steps that could be taken to arrive at this metaphorical destination. Positive stories can also become self-fulfilling.
! Pos narrativ
“win-win” narratives.
“Do you know of any challenge in the history of humankind that was actually successful in its achievement that started out with pessimism, that started out with defeatism?”
two hundred and seventy-five million people around the globe are subjected to life-threatening temperatures at least one day a year, and this number could easily grow to eight hundred million by the middle of the century.
The elderly are particularly vulnerable to heat stress, Foster told me, because they sweat less than young people, and their hearts don’t pump as efficiently.
One consequence of prolonged heat exposure can be a kind of blood poisoning.
The heat wave that affected most of Europe in the summer of 2022 is estimated to have killed more than sixty thousand people.
What is the future we’re creating actually going to feel like?
but found it difficult to hold on to a thought.
the data that had been collected by the various instruments. I had sweated out almost a pint of water every hour. My heart rate had increased by thirty beats a minute and the blood flow through my brachial artery had more than tripled. Despite all the (admittedly involuntary) effort I had made to thermoregulate, my core temperature had risen to a hundred degrees.
You can’t prepare for a future you can’t imagine. The trouble is, it’s hard to picture the future we are creating.
Climate change is characterized not just by uncertainty but by something risk analysts call “deep uncertainty.” There are known unknowns to worry about, and unknown unknowns.
Doomsday Glacier. A recent paper in Science observed that the “eventual collapse” of Thwaites, which is the size of Florida, “may already be inevitable.”
vast geophysical experiment.”
All our infrastructure has been built with the climate of the past in mind. Much of it will have to be rebuilt and then, as the world continues to warm, rebuilt again.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that, globally, an average of twenty-one million people are being displaced by weather-related events every year.
by 2050 as many as a billion people may be on the move.
Either “you will be among them, or you will be receiving them.”
European Commission noted that there’s a strong “economic case” for allowing in more legal immigrants, especially since “the transition to a climate-neutral economy” will require “additional labour and new
a group of American and European researchers, determined that, if we were to burn through all known fossil-fuel reserves, global temperatures could rise by as much as eleven degrees Celsius, or twenty degrees Fahrenheit. (How humanity could keep the oil flowing even as the world drowned and smoldered was a question the researchers did not address.)
there are good reasons to wonder whether optimism lies at the heart of the problem. For the last thirty years—more if you go back to 1965—we have lived as if someone, or some technology, were going to rescue us from ourselves. We are still living that way now.
Climate change isn’t a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn’t a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” though these words are often used. It isn’t going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them.
The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell (New York: Little, Brown, 2023).
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (New York: Crown, 2020).
