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the attendees are far more likely to emerge from such a convention with even firmer convictions, as classic data around the psychology of hazing, from scientists at Stanford and the U.S. Army Leadership Human Research Unit, suggests.

“Subjects who underwent a severe initiation” in order to become part of a group, the researchers concluded in 1959, “perceived the group as being significantly more attractive than did those who underwent a mild initiation or no initiation.”

To reduce this dissonance, an initiate can either “convince himself that the initiation was not very unpleasant, or he can exaggerate the positive characteristics of the group and minimize its negative aspects,” the researchers explain. The more severe the initiation, the less viable the first option becomes, and the more the person must overestimate the attractiveness of the group

The proposed explanation? “Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance”—that is, if someone has gone through an unpleasant initiation to become part of a group, this can be “dissonant with his cognition that there are things about the group that he does not like.”

“Compelling people to do something changes their psychology,”

Trump’s psychological instincts may be uncannily sound. Whatever else you want to say about Donald Trump, he is a keen student of human weakness.

Statistically, the vast majority of attendees are likely to do just fine, even if the convention itself becomes a superspreader event

“Many people, I’d argue, are experiencing what I’d call a ‘latent’ form of climate anxiety or dread, in that they may not be talking about it much but they are feeling it.”

“The main thing is that we find ways to talk about what we are experiencing in a safe and nonjudgmental context, and to be open to listening. All too often, when anxiety or fear comes up, we all want to push it away and move into ‘solutions.’

The psychological weight of climate change can lead to feelings of helplessness and fear, and to climate disengagement. Not surprisingly, those directly impacted by climate-augmented disasters fare even worse

Another way I cope is by simply burning less fossil fuel. This eliminates internal cognitive dissonance by aligning my actions with my knowledge.

“It’s important to remember that inaction is rarely about a lack of concern or care, but is so much more complex,”

“Namely, that we westerners are living in a society that is still deeply entrenched in the very practices we now know are damaging and destructive. This creates a very specific kind of situation—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Unless we know how to work with this dissonance, we will continue to come up against resistance, inaction, and reactivity.

“we need to be careful not to make assumptions about other people’s relationships with these issues. Even if people may not be showing it, research shows again and again that it’s still on their minds and a source of discomfort or distress.”

There are more people in my life talking openly about climate change. And that helps.

In general, suicide is projected to rise dramatically due to climate change; in addition to the psychological toll, our brains don’t respond well physically to excessive heat.

Finally, I actively work to be hope-oriented

Modern climate change is completely different: It’s 100 percent human-caused, so it’s 100 percent human-solvable

this possibility leaves open a middle path, something between sweeping climate action and an unavoidable planetary collision—a rapid cultural shift, one that we all can contribute to through our conversations and our daily actions. And that’s a very hopeful thing.

Sometimes a wave of climate grief breaks over me. It happens unexpectedly

During these moments, I feel with excruciating clarity everything that we’re losing—but also connection and love for those things

Occasionally, however, I feel something quite different, a paralyzing sense of anxiety. This climate dread can last for days, even weeks. It can come with nightmare

n ever

in the minds of Trump’s supporters lingers the belief that a Biden presidency would usher in a reign of terror. Many of them simply have to believe that. Justifying their fealty to a man who is so obviously a moral wreck requires them to turn Joe Biden and the Democratic Party into an existential threat

As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”

“Motivation conditions cognition,”

Trump is given carte blanche by his supporters because they perceive him as their protector, transforming his ruthlessness from a vice into a virtue.

That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.

But if you do succeed in keeping the topic on Trump, they often twist themselves into knots in order to defend him, and in some cases they simply deny reality.

Many shift the topic immediately back to Democrats, because offering a vigorous moral defense of Donald Trump isn’t an easy task. It’s like asking people to stare directly into the sun; they might do it for an instant, but then they look away

Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.

They are similarly unable to admit they are defending an ethic that is at odds with what they have long championed. They have accepted, excused, and applauded Trump’s behavior and tactics, allowing his ends to justify his means. In important respects, this is antithetical to a virtue ethic.

As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”

if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.

Time and again, she comes across students like Stephanie, a white history major at Harvard, who says “race needs to be considered” because an “ethnically diverse community is beneficial to everyone and is such an integral part of the Harvard education.”

What if they add no discernibly “unique” perspective of black culture or rural poverty or the immigrant experience to student life?

Warikoo is slightly more narrow in assessing this cognitive dissonance, highlighting research (including her own) that reveals the paranoia of many white Americans who are “primed to see reverse discrimination in the future,”

“Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it,” reads The Common Application’s most popular prompt. “If this sounds like you, then please share your story.” It’s an appealingly capacious invitation, but it also subtly casts applicants’ “backgrounds” or “identities” in the same terms as an “interest” or “talent,” and it’s perhaps unsurprising that many of the students Warikoo interviewed do the same, recontextualizing the consideration of race and income in admissions with comparisons that avoid questions of inequality altogether. When asked “whether diversity creates problems for the university,

So on the one hand the pro-Russians believe they are fighting fascism once more—Donetsk is Stalingrad and the Ukrainian Army is the Wehrmacht

The Ukrainians, meanwhile, see themselves (correctly) as once again battling the imperial ambitions of a Russian dictator while conveniently forgetting the nastier elements of their own side and parts of its history.

When Russian forces occupied Eastern Ukraine they switched off Ukrainian TV channels and replaced them with Russian ones.

But the paper of record and the Pulitzer Board, both of which sponsored and promoted the issue, are surely different. They aspire to factual, honest journalism — not ideological reframing, repackaged as empirical reality

They imply a liberal view of the world, in which the race of authors is far less important than the cogency of what they have to say, in which history is not predetermined by analyses of “structural oppression,” but by fact and contingency. The Times is supposed to be more about empiricism than activism

But the cases of Crews, Caputo, and Paul Alexander suggest an additional conclusion: that people whose jobs require them to provide “alternative facts” on a regular basis might eventually break under the strain.

Caputo may well represent the face of a second-term Trump administration. Instead of people with expertise and competence, the White House and Cabinet agencies will contain ideologues with no experience—or, worse, ideologues with a long record of bad judgment and terrible errors

another HHS political appointee, Paul Alexander, regularly sent emails harassing employees of the CDC. He described its deputy director, the physician Anne Schuchat, as “duplicitous” for saying she hoped the country could “take [the pandemic] seriously and slow the transmission … we have way too much virus across the country.” Alexander also regularly sought to censor weekly scientific and statistical reports—the “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” to be precise—written by the nation’s most important public-health institution, describing them as “hit pieces” targeting the Trump administration.

This isn’t just a matter of wishful thinking or a few white lies. The president’s campaign staff needs voters to believe that the pandemic is over, or else that it never mattered; that 200,000 people did not really die; that schools aren’t closed; that shops aren’t boarded up; that nothing much happened to the economy;

in this election year we are grappling with something entirely new. The president, the Republican Party, and its campaign machine are collectively seeking to create a completely false picture of the world

that America is ever more respected around the world; that climate change isn’t real; that the U.S. has no legitimate protesters, only violent thugs who have been paid by secretive groups.

It is easy to see why Trump appointees who work in institutions that deal with science and public health might be the first to break: Their jobs require them to grapple every day with data that they have to deny.

The adherents of the QAnon cult may have literally been driven past the point of reason. In order to make sense of the world they can see all around them, they have created an elaborate and obviously false explanation—that an omniscient Trump is fighting a cabal of deep-state satanists and pedophiles.

No wonder Republicans, instead of shunning QAnon believers, are working to elect some of them to Congress in November. They genuinely serve a function, helping Trump supporters navigate the gap between the reality they live in and the fiction they see on Fox and Facebook.

he only historical parallels come, inappropriately, from Stalin’s Soviet Union, Maoist China, and other regimes that created elaborate propaganda versions of the world and then forced people to pretend they were true.

But those alternative realities were backed up by violence. America does not have that kind of police state.

the benefits are really vivid, they are really clear. Everybody agrees that the world will be better off the faster we move. And that really wasn’t the case five or 10 years ago. There was much more muddled analysis and messaging then. And I think we have to take advantage of the new unanimity and not let people fall back on the logic of status quo bias and incumbency and just think that change is expensive and difficult

david wallace-wellsMy basic feeling is that the changes that we need are all systemic. And so the things that individuals can do to make that change are primarily through the political realm, not through their individual behavior. If we want to really halt this problem and get a handle on it, it means large, large scale changes that are beyond the capacity of individuals to enact on their own.

jane coastonHow do we get our house in order? What do I as an individual or the people listening to this podcast, how do I make this happen on my level? Knowing all of that, what do I do? What do I personally need to do? Give me a thing to do, Genevieve!

If you want to learn more about personal responsibility, I recommend Jason Marks’s article in the Sierra Club magazine, “Yes, actually, individual responsibility is essential to solving the climate crisis,” and the New York Times guest essay by Auden Schendler, “Worrying About Your Carbon Footprint is Exactly What Big Oil Wants You to Do.”

david wallace-wells

I don’t know that we have to all take on a feeling of guilt for the rise of G.D.P. under neoliberalism, because I don’t know that most of us have actually even seen that money.

ultimately, the things that we need to do to really get a hold of this are way bigger than cutting your food emissions by 10 percent or 50 percent or whatever. It’s like, the three of us in this room, we can’t build an electric grid, a solar farm. We can’t make sure that there are Tesla charging stations all across the country. We can’t re-imagine land use policy or agricultural policy. We can’t put an honest price on carbon so that when you’re buying gas, you’re actually paying for the environmental damage that’s being caused or when you’re buying an airplane ticket. Those are just things that are well outside of our capacity to control

jane coastonCould you explain what climate justice means to an audience that is me?genevieve guentherBasically, it means that the global north historically has been responsible for the vast majority of carbon pollution. And the global south has been responsible for almost none of it. Since 1990, for example, the top 10 percent of earners have been responsible for 52 percent of the growth of global emissions. And the poorest, 50 percent, who largely live in the global south, have been responsible for about 7 percent of global emissions. But that hasn’t grown at all. Historically, they have contributed nothing to the exponential growth of emissions and the increased and accelerating global heating that we’re already seeing. So the idea of climate justice is that global north nations have a moral responsibility to reduce their emissions first and faster so that there is some room left in whatever carbon budget we still have for the global south to pull themselves out of poverty.

jane coastonDavid, what do you make of what Genevieve said about the messaging about good and evil there?

david wallace-wellsI would say even more importantly, we can’t set our standard at extinction. It’s not like if we survive and avoid extinction, that that’s a success. There is huge suffering between here and there. And every degree of temperature rise is going to create more suffering. And every degree we avoid can help us avoid that.

The climate crisis has begun in the United States, too. But the real violence of it is in the global south. And I would argue that the global north doesn’t see it because the news media isn’t reporting on it and because the kind of white supremacy prevents people in this country from really recognizing that this is a violence that would feel unimaginable if it happened to their children.

genevieve guentherOK, so the first part is understanding why we have to do this. And I would argue that most Americans still don’t know enough about global heating and the climate crisis.

jane coastonYeah, but and a benefit when? Because I think a lot of this messaging relies on something that, in general, people do not like, which is, you may need to do a thing or change a thing about your life for a future that we have not yet defined. From a messaging perspective, how do we message the urgency

To think about the concrete impacts, 350,000 Americans, it’s estimated, die every single year from the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. That is a death toll literally equal to the 2020 death toll from COVID.

Or is it going to take so long that, in fact, things are going to spiral out of control?

within the space of a few years, by simply refusing to accept their own impotence, they have literally remade the entire landscape of global climate politics. Like in the U.S., when we have Joe Biden who Sunrise gave an F to in the primary, talking about this as an existential threat, that is because the protests worked. And they worked in an incredibly short amount of time

I personally think the high consumption, and particularly the flying of people who are in the public eye, trying to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis, is incredibly destructive to building a political movement. They’re actually doing something extremely counterproductive in my interpretation. They’re reinforcing everybody’s cognitive dissonance with their behavior, which is also a form of speech. They’re communicating that they’re not willing to make transformative changes and not willing to support transformative policies, and that, in fact, you need to use fossil fuels even to do climate work. And so, for me, I feel like the people who need to worry about their carbon footprints insofar as anybody does are the 1 percent and people in the climate movement.

here are huge, huge health consequences from this pollution. It may be the case that air pollution may even be a bigger crisis than climate change. That is how dramatic these impacts are. They happen to be caused largely by the same thing so we can solve them at the same time, but we’re talking about rising rates of respiratory disease and coronary disease and cancers of all kinds and Alzheimer’s and dementia and ADHD and criminality and premature birth and low birth weight. And just every aspect of human flourishing is damaged by the pollution that is produced by the burning of fossil fuels

david wallace-wellsIt’s really, really stark, as Genevieve lays out, that it is the wealthy countries of the world and the wealthy people of the world who have engineered this crisis. So whenever we hear about the problem of India, the problem of electrifying sub-Saharan Africa, these are problems. We need to figure them out and do them clean in a way that doesn’t imperil the future of the planet. But those are only problems that we have to deal with now because of the development patterns that countries like ours and across northern Europe went through over the last few decades and centuries.

Half of all emissions in the entire history of humanity have come in the last 30 years. Now since Al Gore published his first book on warming, you know I often joke it’s since the premiere of “Friends,” which means that, actually, the people who have done the lion’s share of the damage to the planet are alive today. And it is true, of course, that the people who have been running Shell and Chevron and ExxonMobil have much more responsibility than I do or Genevieve does or Jane does. But it is also the case that all of us have benefited in significant ways from economic activity that has been powered by fossil fuels and to which we could have raised louder objections earlier.

genevieve guentherI think it’s worthwhile to point out that the vast majority of Americans are literally going to be richer once we have decarbonized, because their electricity, their heating, their transportation, and their health care costs are going to go down significantl

genevieve guentherPick one. Do it once a week, and things will change. First thing is vote. You can’t do that once a week, but vote in every election. Vote

some of the actions that you’re talking about, the individual actions, I think can be useful in terms of generating small scale political energy that can eventually sort of trickle up into politics. Leaders see that we’re making changes. They see that we’re demanding changes. They may feel more comfortable making those changes themselves.

We as a culture need to normalize that it’s actually healthy not to be happy in the face of climate change and that it doesn’t mean we’re failed Americans. It means that we’re actually human beings who are having an appropriate and ethical moral response to the suffering that is coming in the pipe for everybody, also our own children

Or you can donate to groups that are working on electoral politics directly, like the Environmental Voter Project or Stacey Abrams’s Verified Action

david wallace-wellsHonestly, the person I was talking to was the United States. I mean, that is the perspective that we have as a country. And as guilty as I feel as responsible as I feel, as I’m sure, Genevieve, and to some extent, Jane, you feel, all of us are actually behaving in ways that are imposing that kind of suffering on people elsewhere in the world. It’s almost unavoidable, given the systems that we live in today. And that is really horrifying. But I think the more clearly that we can see that, the more likely we are to be demanding real change of our leaders and the systems in which we live

david wallace-wellsWell, some of them can matter in limiting your carbon footprint. So if you don’t eat beef, if you don’t take airplanes, if you drive an electric car, you’re probably pretty far along in reducing your own carbon footprint. And that is one measure of climate responsibility, carbon responsibility

The ability to put your preferred candidates in office is a huge part of the climate fight

david wallace-wellsI think that this story is one about our responsibility towards other humans, in which collectively, human behavior has imperiled the future of the planet. I think as a result, we have to talk about it in terms of good and evil, that there are very obvious sides.

And it is borne disproportionately by Black and Brown and poor people.

genevieve guentherI actually agree with David. This is a systemic problem that is only going to be solved by governments and large corporations leading the transformation of our economies to zero-emission economies. That said, rich people across the globe have a responsibility, a personal responsibility, to reduce their discretionary emissions, to reduce their consumption, both for climate justice reasons and also simply because we need them to do it if we’re going to meet our emissions targets and halt global heating.

what is hopeful about these net zero pledges, even as they are greenwashing, is the fact that these companies feel pressure to make them at all, right? This is a sea change in politics. If they can’t actually transform, they’re going to be pushed out, and new incumbents are going to come in. And the question is, can we do this fast enough to halt global warming in time to preserve much of the habitable world?

The second piece is a kind of climate communication that shows people how this is going to affect them. Most people think of this as a crisis that’s for the global south or for the distant future or for our grandchildren’s grandchildren or whatever. And it’s up to every single communicator, as far as I’m concerned, to make it clear in really concrete embodied terms what this crisis is going to mean for the children who are alive today.

When I started writing about climate five years ago, I would not have thought that this kind of political change was at all possible. We are living through what is a genuinely unprecedented global climate awakening, which has totally changed the landscape of what is possible. And it really has made the world and the future look sunnier

famously last year, Drew Shindell, who’s an air pollution expert at Duke, testified before U.S. Congress saying that a green transition of the American energy system would entirely pay for itself through the public health benefits of cleaner air. You could put aside all of the climate impacts. You could put aside all the benefits of cheaper electricity. And just because we would be healthier as a result, even in the U.S. where air is already clean, the dollars and cents would add up and make that a very, very clear win for all of us

here’s another thing you can do. You can organize your workplace to ask your company to make greener business decisions or to lobby Congress for climate policies

once they’re in office, keep pressuring them. Call their D.C. offices. Call their local offices. Send them emails regularly

he dynamic is even more horrifying elsewhere in the world where other countries have much dirtier air than we do. Estimates are as high as 10 million people globally dying of air pollution every single year, 8.7 million of them from the burning of fossil fuels

then the third piece of that is really showing how making these changes that are required would be such a benefit to them.

that you have to live like a monk to make this work. That may have been, to some degree, true 25, 30 years ago when the alternative systems that we now see right around the corner were much farther away in the distance and much more expensive. But it just isn’t the case now that to green our economy will require an enormous burden

when we think of it simply in terms of, is the economy going to grow faster or is it going to go slower, I think we really, really miss the huge, huge public health consequences of continuing running the systems as we are running them today, and also the huge benefits we would get from getting off those systems

david wallace-wellsIn 2070, we’re in a net zero world. Nobody has a carbon footprint. So having more kids is not going to make one difference in either direction. And I think we’re still in a place where we can keep that goal in mind and fight to make that possible so that we don’t have to do things like reduce family size.

I had this interaction just before the pandemic at an event I did. I keep thinking about it. I think about it maybe every week, maybe every day, where I gave a talk about looking at how dire some of these situations could be. And afterwards, somebody came up to me who assured me that he was not a climate denier. And then he said, so really, how bad is it going to get? And I said, well, at two degrees, we’re talking about 150 million people dying of air pollution. And he said, but that’s out of 8 billion. And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I’m not talking about the total extinction of the human race here, but 150 million is 150 million. That’s 25 Holocausts. And he said, but out of 8 billion.

the true, are we going to make humans extinct, kind of futures that we were talking about as slim but real possibilities a few years ago, I think are much, much less likely today. And that is in large part the result of climate protests by people who started their activism within the last few years.

genevieve guentherAnd just say that the word “responsibility” has two different definitions, right? There’s the sense of responsibility as guilt. Who is responsible for this crime? Who has to pay the price? But then there’s responsibility as duty. Who’s going to take responsibility for cleaning up this mess?

There is a very small ask that can be made, which is just to support the people who support aggressive climate action. We’re talking about massive, immediate, or quasi immediate payback for all of the investments we’re making.

If you don’t have the time to do that, donate money. Donate money to organizations that are putting their bodies on the line. Here are some of them— Sunrise, Fridays for Future

finally, one of the most impactful things that you can do is simply talk about climate change in your social networks, especially when it feels most socially awkward and embarrassing. Because unless we continue to break the kind of conspiracy of climate silence that allows people to look away, we’re not actually going to have the kind of pressure internally and psychologically in people that will help them join the climate movemen

genevieve guentherWell, let me contextualize this for a moment. The concept of the carbon footprint is actually a legitimate concept in sustainability research. It was developed by two researchers in the 1990s

What is the 1 percent? In the United States, I would define the 1% as people making $450,000 a year and above. So it’s hard to imagine how much consumption is normalized among these people. It is not at all considered wasteful to buy a new SUV every two or three years as new models come out. It is not all considered extravagant to fly up to 20 times a year. It is not at all horrific to buy an entirely new wardrobe two or three times a year and throw it all away. In fact, this is considered a signal that you are in the rich group and that you are living your best life.

it actually has to be done right now. We don’t get another shot at this.

Do my personal actions, be they avoiding plastic straws or composting or calculating my personal carbon footprint, as oil companies seem to really want me to do, or switching light bulbs or becoming a vegetarian, in the scheme of averting climate change or mitigating climate change, do those actions really matter?

I think that there are certain actors who have played hugely disproportionate, often toxic, roles in that story, namely the fossil fuel industry and their allies in political power, not just in the U.S. but all around the world.

that’s not to say that that person is as culpable as the CEOs of ExxonMobil. Obviously, there’s a huge spectrum of culpability, but I think that a huge majority of Americans are understandably viewed by people elsewhere in the world as contributing to the problem as opposed to contributing to the solution, and that we should not dismiss that judgment because we happen to think, well, I was just doing it for myself, or I was just acting in the system in which I live. We should take seriously that judgment and try to think about what we can do to sort of make it right, so to speak.

But BP extracted this concept from academia and created a multimillion dollar campaign, trying to change the discourse of the climate crisis and make, as you said, Jane, everybody feel responsible for causing the climate crisis, but also feeling responsible for solving it by doing things like no longer driving or no longer flying or no longer eating beef or turning off lights or using plastic straws. And as David said, this is impossible. Even if every single one of us brought our personal carbon emissions down to zero, we would not halt global heating.

number two, join a campaign or an activist group. There are local chapters of groups called the Sunrise Movement and 350.org in many communities. If you’re really hardcore, you can join Extinction Rebellion

It will require an investment, but that will sort of pay for itself in the relatively short term. And so we’re now in a situation where a lot of people often think that moving into a sustainable future is going to make their lives suck. And the truth is that just isn’t the case, but that is what the companies that are profiting from the status quo would like you to think because nobody wants their lives to suck.

I think we need to really tell the climate story as a story of good and evil because these people have known for decades what their products were going to do. And not only did they keep producing and selling fossil fuels, they lied about it. They lied about what they knew. And they tried to do everything they could to capture our political system just to sustain their own wealth and power. I think that’s pretty bad. It’s criminal. It’s absolutely criminal.

some of the changes that you’re talking about, people are compelled to do because they don’t want to feel a part of the ugliness of the destruction of the planet, more than because they’re making a rational calculation about how best to use their time and what they can do that has the highest impact

But the fossil fuel industry, as part of their disinformation campaign, wants to make everyone feel helpless, feel overwhelmed, and wants to shift our attention away from the political action that has a chance of resolving the climate crisis to what can’t possibly work, which is focusing on our carbon footprint.

I just don’t think that that’s the end all, be all of it, because I do think that many people, even today, think, OK, I want the future to be stable and green and prosperous. But I don’t want to pay $1 more at the pump for a gallon of gas and may actually vote in an election on that basis

That said, reducing the discretionary emissions of the top 1 percent is actually a piece of the decarbonization puzzle. So, if the top 10 percent reduced their carbon emissions do

n to the level of the average European, which is still quite significant — eight tons a year — we would be about one-third of the way to decarbonizing our systems. So we emit as a globe about 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year. And this reduction in luxury consumption would reduce emissions by about 10 gigatons a year. So that is just a staggering number.

Most of the people who are listening to this podcast and nobody in this room, for sure, is responsible for causing the climate crisis. But we’re all responsible for now solving it to the best way that we can.

Greenpeace. And here are some social justice organizations — UPROSE and WE ACT. There are also two new organizations who are writing climate policy in a new way and lobbying on the Hill to get them passed. They are Climate Power and Evergreen Action.

While there is a sort of transition bump and we should have public policy that addresses it, especially for communities who are already suffering, it’s also the case that the obvious economic logic is also the obvious environmental logic here. These are no longer in tension.

for me, that answer is really exclusively through a political engagement and political activism because we really need to shake the whole infrastructure of the world. And the only people who are capable of doing that are the people who are in corridors of power in politics and the corporate worl

Mr. Johnson seemed, more than any of his predecessors, to grasp this fact. His knack for not apologizing was remarkable. His breezy denials induced a sort of cognitive dissonance in the minds of those accusing him — Was there some fact they had missed? Were they going mad? Was he? — and permitted supporters to make their own denials, too. In recent months, it produced a sort of moral vacuum in Britain’s government, in which nobody seemed to have the power to hold the prime minister to account.