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Even movies that explore adaptive responses to climate change make glum assumptions. In Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” humanity’s future lies on a far distant planet; Earth is unsalvageable. James Cameron’s first “Avatar” movie imagines that resource crises will drive humanity to galaxy-wide pillage.

In Robinson’s telling, climate change will upend our lives, but we all have something to contribute to the response to this radical reordering.

The idea that pop culture can tell these stories creatively and dynamically is not merely speculative.

“The Ministry for the Future” novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has spent decades creatively imagining how humanity might respond to harsh conditions, whether that means Mars and the asteroid belt or a drowned New York City.

If activists, be they filmmakers or politicians, want to persuade the public to adopt new behaviors, or even to do more than simply despair, they need to give the ordinary person a vision for what to do.

e stories creatively and dyn

Now, numerous advertising executives say they’re willing to move their money elsewhere, especially if Mr. Musk eliminates the safeguards that allowed Twitter to remove racist rants and conspiracy theories.

“At the end of the day, it’s not the brands who need to be concerned, because they’ll just spend their budgets elsewhere — it’s Twitter that needs to be concerned,” said David Jones

On Wednesday night, at Twitter’s annual NewFronts presentation for advertisers at Pier 17 in New York, company representatives stressed Twitter’s value for marketers: as a top destination for people to gather and discuss major cultural moments like sporting events or the Met Gala, increasingly through video posts.

Twitter differs from Facebook, whose millions of small and midsize advertisers generate the bulk of the company’s revenue and depend on its enormous size and targeting abilities to reach customers. Twitter’s clientele is heavily weighted with large, mainstream companies, which tend to be wary of their ads appearing alongside problematic content.

Twitter earns the vast majority of its ad revenue from brand awareness campaigns, whose effectiveness is much harder to evaluate than ads that target users based on their interests or that push for a direct response, such as clicking through to a website.

Twitter’s reach is also narrower than many rivals, with 229 million users who see ads, compared with 830 million users on LinkedIn and 1.96 billion daily users on Facebook.

“Even the likes of LinkedIn have eclipsed the ability for us to target consumers beyond what Twitter is providing,” he said. “We’re going to go where the results are, and with a lot of our clients, we haven’t seen the performance on Twitter from an ad perspective that we have with other platforms.”

“Twitter’s done a better job than many platforms at building trust with advertisers — they’ve been more progressive, more responsive and more humble about initiating ways to learn,” said Mark Read

On Twitter, he has criticized ads as “manipulating public opinion” and discussed his refusal to “pay famous people to fake endorse.”

“There’s a fork in the road, where Path A leads to an unfiltered place with the worst of human behavior and no brands want to go anywhere near it,” said Mr. Jones of Brandtech. “And Path B has one of the world’s genius entrepreneurs, who knows a lot about running companies, unleashing a wave of innovation that has people looking back in a few years and saying, ‘Remember when everyone was worried about Musk coming in?’”

When viewed with the Inflation Reduction Act, which the House is poised to pass later this week, and last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, a major shift in congressional climate spending comes into focus. According to the RMI analysis, these three laws are set to more than triple the federal government’s average annual spending on climate and clean energy this decade, compared with the 2010s.

Within a few years, when the funding has fully ramped up, the government will spend roughly $80 billion a year on accelerating the development and deployment of zero-carbon energy and preparing for the impacts of climate change. That exceeds the GDP of about 120 of the 192 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change

By the end of the decade, the federal government will have spent more than $521 billion

the bill’s programs focus on the bleeding edge of the decarbonization problem, investing money in technology that should lower emissions in the 2030s and beyond.

The International Energy Association has estimated that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today.

To get those technologies ready in time, we need to deploy those new ideas as fast as we can, then rapidly get them to commercial scale, Carey said. “What used to take two decades now needs to take six to 10 years.” That’s what the CHIPS Act is supposed to do

The law, for instance, establishes a new $20 billion Directorate for Technology, which will specialize in pushing new technologies from the prototype stage into the mass market. It is meant to prevent what happened with the solar industry—where America invented a new technology, only to lose out on commercializing it—from happening again

Congress has explicitly tasked the new office with studying “natural and anthropogenic disaster prevention or mitigation” as well as “advanced energy and industrial efficiency technologies,” including next-generation nuclear reactors.

The bill also directs about $12 billion in new research, development, and demonstration funding to the Department of Energy, according to RMI’s estimate. That includes doubling the budget for ARPA-E, the department’s advanced-energy-projects skunk works.

it allocates billions to upgrade facilities at the government’s in-house defense and energy research institutes, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Berkeley Lab, which conducts environmental-science research.

RMI’s estimate of the climate spending in the CHIPS bill should be understood as just that: an estimate. The bill text rarely specifies how much of its new funding should go to climate issues.

When you add CHIPS, the IRA, and the infrastructure law together, Washington appears to be unifying behind a new industrial policy, focused not only on semiconductors and defense technology but clean energy

The three bills combine to form a “a coordinated, strategic policy for accelerating the transition to the technologies that are going to define the 21st century,”

scholars and experts have speculated about whether industrial policy—the intentional use of law to nurture and grow certain industries—might make a comeback to help fight climate change. Industrial policy was central to some of the Green New Deal’s original pitch, and it has helped China develop a commanding lead in the global solar industry.

“Industrial policy,” he said, “is back.”

Over the subsequent four decades, Thatcherites at think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies (which Margaret Thatcher helped set up) described the struggle against both the Labour Party and the broader persistence of Socialism in the Communist and non-Communist world as a “war of ideas.”

Thatcherites, known collectively as the ultras, gained fresh blood in the 2010s as a group of Gen Xers too young to experience Thatcherism in its insurgent early years — including the former home secretary Priti Patel, the former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the former minister of state for universities Chris Skidmore, Mr. Kwarteng and Ms. Truss — attempted to reboot her ideology for the new millennium.

They followed their idol not only in her antagonism to organized labor but also in her less-known fascination with Asian capitalism. In 2012’s “Britannia Unchained,” a book co-written by the group that remains a Rosetta Stone for the policy surprises of the last month, they slammed the Britons for their eroded work ethic and “culture of excuses” and the “cosseted” public sector unions. They praised China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kon

“Britannia Unchained” expressed a desire to go back to the future by restoring Victorian values of hard work, self-improvement and bootstrapping.

While the Gen X Thatcherites didn’t scrimp on data, they also saw something ineffable at the root of British malaise. “Beyond the statistics and economic theories,” they wrote, “there remains a sense in which many of Britain’s problems lie in the sphere of cultural values and mind-set.”

As Thatcher herself put it, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Britain needed a leap of faith to restore itself.

Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.”But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck.

the money markets were not waiting for an act of faith in Laffer Curve fundamentalism after all. This was “Reaganism without the dollar.” Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.

ince the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies

The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”

The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.

“It just came down to not having enough money,” said Terence Trouillot, a senior editor at Frieze, a contemporary art magazine . He spent nearly three years on the AICA-USA board, resigning in 2022. He said that initiatives to re-energize the group “were just moving too slowly.”

According to Lilly Wei, a longtime AICA-USA board member who recently resigned, the group explored different ways of protecting writers in the industry. There were unrealized plans of turning the organization into a union; others hoped to create a permanent emergency fund to keep financially struggling critics afloat. She said the organization has instead canceled initiatives, including an awards program for the best exhibitions across the country.

Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories.

“It’s crazy that the ideal job nowadays is producing catalog essays for galleries, which are basically just sales pitches,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”

Noah Dillon, who was on the AICA-USA board until he resigned last year, has been reluctant to recommend that anyone follow his path to become a critic. Not that they could. The graduate program in art writing that he attended at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan also closed during the pandemic.

David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who knows about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.”

While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs.

In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant.

The need for change in museums was pointed out in the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, published by Artnet News in December, that analyzed more than a decade of data from over 30 cultural institutions. It found that just 11 percent of acquisitions at U.S. museums were by female artists and only 2.2 percent were by Black American artists

(National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )

Julia Halperin, one of the study’s organizers, who recently left her position as Artnet’s executive editor, said that the industry has an asymmetric approach to diversity. “The pool of artists is diversifying somewhat, but the pool of staff critics has not,” she said.

the matter of diversity in criticism is compounded by the fact that opportunities for all critics have been diminished.