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Strangely, though nonprofits are increasingly expected to perform like businesses, they do not get the same leeway in funding that government-contracted businesses do. They don’t have nearly the bargaining power of big corporations, or the ability to raise costs for their products and services, because of tight controls on grant funding. “D.C. is full of millionaires who contract with government in the defense field, and they make a killing, and yet if you’re a nonprofit, chances are you aren’t getting the full amount of funding to cover the cost of the services required,” Iliff said. “Can you imagine Lockheed Martin or Boeing putting up with a government contract that didn’t allow for overhead?”

When faced with dwindling funding, one response would be to cut a program or reduce the number of people an organization serves. But nonprofit leaders have shown themselves very reluctant to do that. Instead, many meet financial challenges by squeezing more work out of their staffs without a proportional increase in their pay:

nonprofits like PIRG, for example, have a tradition of forcing employees to work long, unpaid hours—especially their youngest staff. “There’s a culture that says, ‘Young people are paying their dues. It’s okay for them to be paid for fewer hours than they’re actually working because it’s in the effort of helping them grow up and contribute to something greater than they are,’” Boris says.

These nonprofit employees are saying that their operations depend on large numbers of their lowest-paid staff working unpaid overtime hours. One way to get  to that point would be to face a series of choices between increased productivity on the one hand and reduced hours, increased pay, or more hiring on the other, and to choose more productivity every time. That some nonprofits have done this speaks to a culture that can put the needs of staff behind mission-driven ambitions.

In the 1970s, 62 percent of full-time, salaried workers qualified for mandatory overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week. Today, because the overtime rules have not had a major update since then (until this one), only 7 percent of workers are covered, whether they work in the nonprofit sector or elsewhere. In other words, U.S. organizations—nonprofit or otherwise—have been given the gift of a large pool of laborers who, as long as they clear a relatively low earnings threshold and do tasks that meet certain criteria, do not have to be paid overtime.

Unsurprisingly, many nonprofits have taken advantage of that pool of free work. (For-profit companies have too, but they also have the benefit of being more in control of their revenue streams.) B

“There is this feeling that the mission is so important that nothing should get in the way of it,”

“Too often, I have seen the passion for social change turned into a weapon against the very people who do much—if not most—of the hard work, and put in most of the hours,” Hastings recently wrote on her blog. “Because they are highly motivated by passion, the reasoning goes, they don’t need to be motivated by decent salaries or sustainable work hours or overtime pay.”

A 2011 survey of more than 2,000 nonprofit employees by Opportunity Knocks, a human-resources organization that specializes in nonprofits, in partnership with Jessica Word, an associate professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that half of employees in the nonprofit sector may be burned out or in danger of burnout.

. “These are highly emotional and difficult jobs,” she said, adding, “These organizations often have very high rates of employee turnover, which results from a combination of burnout and low compensation.” Despite the dearth of research, Word’s findings don’t appear to be unusual: A more recent study of nonprofits in the U.S. and Canada found that turnover, one possible indicator of burnout, is higher in nonprofits than in the overall labor market.

for all their hours and emotional labor, nonprofit employees generally don’t make much money. A 2014 study by Third Sector New England, a resource center for nonprofits, found that 43 percent of nonprofit employees in New England were making less than $28,000 per year—far less than a living wage for families with children in most cities in the United States, and well below the national median income of between $40,000 and $50,000 per year.

Why would nonprofit workers be willing to stay in jobs where they are underpaid, or, in some cases, accept working conditions that violate the spirit of the labor laws that protect them? One plausible reason is that they are just as committed to the cause as their superiors

But it also might be that some nonprofits exploit gray areas in the law to cut costs. For instance, only workers who are labelled as managers are supposed to be exempt from overtime, but many employers stretch the definition of “manager” far beyond its original intent.

even regardless of these designations, the emotionally demanding work at many nonprofits is sometimes difficult to shoehorn into a tidy 40-hours-a-week schedule. Consider Elle Roberts, who was considered exempt from overtime restrictions and was told not to work more than 40 hours a week when, as a young college grad, she worked at a domestic-violence shelter in northwest Indiana. Doing everything from home visits to intake at the shelter, Roberts still ignored her employer’s dictates and regularly worked well more than 40 hours a week providing relief for women in crisis. Yet she was not paid for that extra time.

“The unspoken expectation is that you do whatever it takes to get whatever it is done for the people that you’re serving,” she says. “And anything less than that, you’re not quite doing enough.

The hierarchy of status is a different one. The professionals are the apex of that hierarchy.

these two hierarchies live side by side. They share a lot of the same assumptions about the world and a lot of the same attitudes, but they also differ in important ways. So I’m not one of these people who says the Democrats and the Republicans are the same. I don’t think they are. But there are sometimes similarities between these two groups.

professionals tend to be very liberal on essentially any issue other than workplaces issues. So on every matter of cultural issues, culture war issues, all the things that have been so prominent in the past, they can be very liberal.

On economic questions, however, they tend not to be. (dishes clattering) They tend to be much more conservative. And their attitudes towards working-class people in general and organized labor specifically is very contemptuous.

if you look just back to the Bill Clinton administration: In policy after policy after policy, he was choosing between groups of Americans, and he was always choosing the interests of professionals over the interests of average people. You take something like NAFTA, which was a straight class issue, right down the middle, where working people are on one side of the divide and professionals are on another. And they’re not just on either side of the divide: Working people are saying, “This is a betrayal. You’re going to ruin us.” And professional people are saying, “What are you talking about? This is a no-brainer. This is what you learn on the first day of economics class.” And hilariously, the working people turned out to be right about that. The people flaunting their college degrees turned out to be wrong.

Every policy decision he made was like this. The crime bill of 1994, which was this sort of extraordinary crackdown on all sorts of different kinds of people. And at the same time he’s deregulating Wall Street.

You’re teaching a course that meets three times a week and you’re getting $1,500 for an entire semester. That was a shocking lesson but at the same time that was happening to us, the price of college was going up and up and up, because increasingly the world or increasingly the American public understands and believes that you have to have a college degree to get ahead in life. So they are charging what the markets can bear

If you go down the list of leading Democrats, leading Democratic politicians, what you find is that they’re all plucked from obscurity by fancy universities. This is their life story. Bill Clinton was from a town in Arkansas, goes to Georgetown, becomes a Rhodes Scholar, goes to Yale Law School — the doors of the world open up for him because of college.

beginning in the 1960s, Americans decided that the right way to pursue opportunities was through the university. It’s more modern than you think. I was reading a book about social class from right after World War II. And the author was describing this transition, this divide between people who came up through their work, who learned on the job and were promoted, versus people who went to universities. And this was in the ’40s. But by the time Bill Clinton was coming up in the ’60s, university was essential

just look at his cabinet choices, which are all from a very concentrated very narrow sector of the American elite. It’s always Ivy League institutions.

The tuition price spiral is one of the great landmark institutions of our country in the last couple of decades.

Or deregulating telecoms. Or capital gains tax cuts. It’s always choosing one group over another.

look, I’m in favor of education. I think people should be educated, should go to college. I think it’s insane that it costs as much as it does. And I think that the country is increasingly agreeing with me

The student debt crisis? This is unbearable. We have put an entire generation of young people — basically they come out of college with the equivalent of a mortgage and very little to show for it. It’s unbelievable that we’ve done this. My dad went to college basically for free. It wasn’t even that expensive when I went, in the early 1980s. This is unbelieveable what we’re doing to young people now and it can’t go on

You seem to be suggesting, the way you talk about the Democrats, that somehow this is elitist and to pursue an education puts you out of touch with real people.I don’t think so. Especially since we’re rapidly becoming a country where — what is the percentage of people who have a college degree now? It’s pretty high. It’s a lot higher than it was when I was young.

One of the chronic failings of meritocracy is orthodoxy. You get people who don’t listen to voices outside their discipline. Economists are the most flagrant example of this. The economics profession, which treats other ways of understanding the world with utter contempt. And in fact they treat a lot of their fellow economists with utter contempt.

there’s no solidarity in a meritocracy. The guys at the top of the profession have very little sympathy for the people at the bottom. When one of their colleagues gets fired, they don’t go out on strike

There’s no solidarity in this group, but there is this amazing deference between the people at the top. And that’s what you see with Obama. He’s choosing those guys.

you start to wonder, maybe expertise is a problem.But I don’t think so. I think it’s a number of things.

The first is orthodoxy which I mentioned

when Clinton ran in ’92, they were arguing about inequality then as well. And it’s definitely the question of our time. The way that issue manifested was Wall Street in ’08 and ’09. He could have taken much more drastic steps. He could have unwound bailouts, broken up the banks, fired some of those guys. They bailed out banks in the Roosevelt years too and they broke up banks all the time. They put banks out of business. They fired executives, all that sort of thing. It is all possible, there is precedent and he did none of it

the third thing is this. You go back and look at when government by expert has worked, because it has worked. It worked in the Roosevelt administration, very famously. They called it the Brains Trust. These guys were excellent.

These were not the cream of the intellectual crop. Now he did have some Harvard- and Yale-certified brains but even these were guys who were sort of in protest. Galbraith: This is a man who spent his entire career at war with economic orthodoxy. I mean, I love that guy. You go right on down the list. Its amazing the people he chose. They weren’t all from this one part of American life.

Is there a hero in your book?I don’t think there is.

The overarching question of our time is inequality, as [Obama] himself has said. And it was in Bill Clinton’s time too.Well you look back over his record and he’s done a better job than most people have done. He’s no George W. Bush. He hasn’t screwed up like that guy did. There have been no major scandals. He got us out of the Iraq war. He got us some form of national health insurance. Those are pretty positive things. But you have to put them in the context of the times, weigh them against what was possible at the time. And compared to what was possible, I think, no. It’s a disappointment.

The second is that a lot of the professions have been corrupted. This is a very interesting part of the book, which I don’t explore at length. I wish I had explored it more. The professions across the board have been corrupted — accounting, real estate appraisers, you just go down the list

What else? You know a better solution for health care. Instead he has this deal where insurance companies are basically bullet-proof forever. Big Pharma. Same thing: When they write these trade deals, Big Pharma is always protected in them. They talk about free trade. Protectionism is supposed to be a bad word. Big Pharma is always protected when they write these trade deals.

You talk about “a way of life from which politicians have withdrawn their blessing.” What is that way of life?You mean manufacturing?You tell me. A sort of blue-collar way of life. It’s the America that I remember from 20, 30, 40 years ago. An America where ordinary people without college degrees were able to have a middle class standard of living. Which was — this is hard for people to believe today — that was common when I was young

Today that’s disappeared. It’s disappearing or it has disappeared. And we’ve managed to convince ourselves that the reason it’s disappeared is because — on strictly meritocratic grounds, using the logic of professionalism — that people who didn’t go to college don’t have any right to a middle-class standard of living. They aren’t educated enough. You have to be educated if you want a middle-class standard of living.

here have been so many different mechanisms brought into play in order to take their power away. One is the decline of organized labor. It’s very hard to form a union in America. If you try to form a union in the workplace, you’ll just get fired. This is well known. Another, NAFTA. All the free trade treaties we’ve entered upon have been designed to give management the upper hand over their workers. They can threaten to move the plant. That used to happen of course before NAFTA but now it happens more often.

Basically everything we’ve done has been designed to increase the power of management over labor in a broad sociological sense.

And then you think about our solutions for these things. Our solutions for these things always have something to do with education. Democrats look at the problems I am describing and for every economic problem, they see an educational solution

The problem is not that we aren’t smart enough; the problem is that we don’t have any power

Why do you think that is?I go back to the same explanation which is that Obama and company, like Clinton and company, are in thrall to a world view that privileges the interest of this one class over everybody else. And Silicon Valley is today when you talk about the creative class or whatever label you want to apply to this favored group, Silicon Valley is the arch-representative.

So do you think it’s just a matter of being enthralled or is it a matter of money? Jobs? Oh the revolving door! Yes. The revolving door, I mean these things are all mixed together.

When you talk about social class, yes, you are talking about money. You are talking about the jobs that these people do and the jobs that they get after they’re done working for government. Or before they begin working for government. So the revolving door — many people have remarked upon the revolving door between the Obama administration and Wall Street.

Now it’s between the administration and Silicon Valley. There’s people coming in from Google. People going out to work at Uber.

the productivity advances that it has made possible are extraordinary. What I’m skeptical of is when we say, oh, there’s a classic example when Jeff Bezos says, ‘Amazon is not happening to book-selling. The future is happening to book-selling.’ You know when people cast innovation — the interests of my company — as, that’s the future. That’s just God. The invisible hand is doing that. It just is not so.

Every economic arrangement is a political decision. It’s not done by God. It’s not done by the invisible hand — I mean sometimes it is, but it’s not the future doing it. It’s in the power of our elected leaders to set up the economic arrangements that we live in. And to just cast it off and say, oh that’s just technology or the future is to just blow off the entire question of how we should arrange this economy that we’re stumbling into.

I may end up voting for Hillary this fall. If she’s the candidate and Trump is the Republican. You bet I’m voting for her. There’s no doubt in my mind. Unless something were to change really really really dramatically.

Bernie Sanders because he has raised the issues that I think are really critical. He’s a voice of discontent which we really need in the Democratic party. I’m so tired of this smug professional class satisfaction. I’ve just had enough of it. He’s talking about what happens to the millennials. That’s really important. He’s talking about the out-of-control price of college. He’s even talking about monopoly and anti-trust. He’s talking about health care. As far as I’m concerned, he’s hitting all the right notes. Now, Hillary, she’s not so bad, right? I mean she’s saying the same things. Usually after a short delay. But he’s also talking about trade. That’s critical. He’s really raising all of the issues, or most of the issues that I think really need to be raised.

My main critique is that she, like other professional class liberals who are so enthralled with meritocracy, that she can’t see this broader critique of all our economic arrangements that I’ve been describing to you. For her, every problem is a problem of the meritocracy: It’s how do we get talented people into the top ranking positions where they deserve to be

People who are talented should be able to rise to the top. I agree on all that stuff. However that’s not the problem right now. The problems are much more systemic, much deeper, much bigger. The whole thing needs to be called into question. So I think sometimes watching Hillary’s speeches that she just doesn’t get that

“My experience in those four months was the worst experience I’ve ever had in working in a company,” Alex Kairu, one of the Kenya workers, said in an interview.

OpenAI marshaled a sprawling global pipeline of specialized human labor for over two years to enable its most cutting-edge AI technologies to exist, the documents show

“It’s something that needs to get done,” Sears said. “It’s just so unbelievably ugly.”

eviewing toxic content goes hand-in-hand with the less objectionable work to make systems like ChatGPT usable.

The work done for OpenAI is even more vital to the product because it is seeking to prevent the company’s own software from pumping out unacceptable content, AI experts say.

Sears said CloudFactory determined there was no way to do the work without harming its workers and decided not to accept such projects.

companies could soon spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to provide AI systems with human feedback. Others estimate that companies are already investing between millions and tens of millions of dollars on it annually. OpenAI said it hired more than 1,000 workers for this purpose.

Another layer of human input asks workers to rate different answers from a chatbot to the same question for which is least problematic or most factually accurate. In response to a question asking how to build a homemade bomb, for example, OpenAI instructs workers to upvote the answer that declines to respond, according to OpenAI research. The chatbot learns to internalize the behavior through multiple rounds of feedback. 

A spokeswoman for Sama, the San Francisco-based outsourcing company that hired the Kenyan workers, said the work with OpenAI began in November 2021. She said the firm terminated the contract in March 2022 when Sama’s leadership became aware of concerns surrounding the nature of the project and has since exited content moderation completely.

OpenAI also hires outside experts to provoke its model to produce harmful content, a practice called “red-teaming” that helps the company find other gaps in its system.

At first, the texts were no more than two sentences. Over time, they grew to as much as five or six paragraphs. A few weeks in, Mathenge and Bill Mulinya, another team leader, began to notice the strain on their teams. Workers began taking sick and family leaves with increasing frequency, they said.

The tasks that the Kenya-based workers performed to produce the final safety check on ChatGPT’s outputs were yet a fourth layer of human input. It was often psychologically taxing. Several of the Kenya workers said they have grappled with mental illness and that their relationships and families have suffered. Some struggle to continue to work.

On July 11, some of the OpenAI workers lodged a petition with the Kenyan parliament urging new legislation to protect AI workers and content moderators. They also called for Kenya’s existing laws to be amended to recognize that being exposed to harmful content is an occupational hazard

Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer and managing partner at Nzili & Sumbi Advocates who is representing the workers, said despite their critical contributions, OpenAI and Sama exploited their poverty as well as the gaps in Kenya’s legal framework. The workers on the project were paid on average between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokeswoman.

The Sama spokeswoman said the workers engaged in the OpenAI project volunteered to take on the work and were paid according to an internationally recognized methodology for determining a living wage. The contract stated that the fee was meant to cover others not directly involved in the work, including project managers and psychological counselors.

Kenya has become a hub for many tech companies seeking content moderation and AI workers because of its high levels of education and English literacy and the low wages associated with deep poverty.

Some Kenya-based workers are suing Meta’s Facebook after nearly 200 workers say they were traumatized by work requiring them to review videos and images of rapes, beheadings and suicides.

A Kenyan court ruled in June that Meta was legally responsible for the treatment of its contract workers, setting the stage for a shift in the ground rules that tech companies including AI firms will need to abide by to outsource projects to workers in the future.

OpenAI signed a one-year contract with Sama to start work in November 2021. At the time, mid-pandemic, many workers viewed having any work as a miracle, said Richard Mathenge, a team leader on the OpenAI project for Sama and a cosigner of the petition.

OpenAI researchers would review the text passages and send them to Sama in batches for the workers to label one by one. That text came from a mix of sources, according to an OpenAI research paper: public data sets of toxic content compiled and shared by academics, posts scraped from social media and internet forums such as Reddit and content generated by prompting an AI model to produce harmful outputs. 

The generated outputs were necessary, the paper said, to have enough examples of the kind of graphic violence that its AI systems needed to avoid. In one case, OpenAI researchers asked the model to produce an online forum post of a teenage girl whose friend had enacted self-harm, the paper said.

OpenAI asked the workers to parse text-based sexual content into four categories of severity, documents show. The worst was descriptions of child sexual-abuse material, or C4. The C3 category included incest, bestiality, rape, sexual trafficking and sexual slavery—sexual content that could be illegal if performed in real life.

Jason Kwon, general counsel at OpenAI, said in an interview that such work was really valuable and important for making the company’s systems safe for everyone that uses them. It allows the systems to actually exist in the world, he said, and provides benefits to users.

Working on the violent-content team, Kairu said, he read hundreds of posts a day, sometimes describing heinous acts, such as people stabbing themselves with a fork or using unspeakable methods to kill themselves

He began to have nightmares. Once affable and social, he grew socially isolated, he said. To this day he distrusts strangers. When he sees a fork, he sees a weapon.

Mophat Okinyi, a quality analyst, said his work included having to read detailed paragraphs about parents raping their children and children having sex with animals. He worked on a team that reviewed sexual content, which was contracted to handle 15,000 posts a month, according to the documents. His six months on the project tore apart his family, he said, and left him with trauma, anxiety and depression.

In March 2022, management told staffers the project would end earlier than planned. The Sama spokeswoman said the change was due to a dispute with OpenAI over one part of the project that involved handling images. The company canceled all contracts with OpenAI and didn’t earn the full $230,000 that had been estimated for the four projects, she said.

Several months after the project ended, Okinyi came home one night with fish for dinner for his wife, who was pregnant, and stepdaughter. He discovered them gone and a message from his wife that she’d left, he said.“She said, ‘You’ve changed. You’re not the man I married. I don’t understand you anymore,’” he said.

we can probably find ways to subsidize — through public means and private — a continuing decline in blue-collar work.

By historical standards their lives are more comfortable than the left often allows, and the fiscal cost of their situation is more sustainable than the right tends to admits. (Medicare may bankrupt us, but food stamps probably will not.)

One could make the case that the right to not have a boss is actually the hardest won of modern freedoms: should it really trouble us if more people in a rich society end up exercising it?

the decline of work carries social costs as well as an economic price tag. Even a grinding job tends to be an important source of social capital, providing everyday structure for people who live alone, a place to meet friends and kindle romances for people who lack other forms of community, a path away from crime and prison for young men, an example to children and a source of self-respect for parents.

it poses a much greater threat to social mobility than to absolute prosperity. (A nonworking working class may not be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise above their station.) And its costs will be felt in people’s private lives and inner worlds even when they don’t show up in the nation’s G.D.P.

we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before. But human flourishing is another matter. And it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work.

If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.

There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

The first suggestion to Rafe Pomerance that humankind was destroying the conditions necessary for its own survival came on Page 66 of the government publication EPA-600/7-78-019. It was a technical report about coal

‘This Is the Whole Banana’ Spring 1979

here was an urgent problem that demanded their attention, MacDonald believed, because human civilization faced an existential crisis. In “How to Wreck the Environment,” a 1968 essay published while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” One of the most potentially devastating such weapons, he believed, was the gas that we exhaled with every breath: carbon dioxide. By vastly increasing carbon emissions, the world’s most advanced militaries could alter weather patterns and wreak famine, drought and economic collapse.

the Jasons. They were like one of those teams of superheroes with complementary powers that join forces in times of galactic crisis. They had been brought together by federal agencies, including the C.I.A, to devise scientific solutions to national-security problems: how to detect an incoming missile; how to predict fallout from a nuclear bomb; how to develop unconventional weapons, like plague-infested rats.

Agle pointed to an article about a prominent geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, who was conducting a study on climate change with the Jasons, the mysterious coterie of elite scientists to which he belonged

During the spring of 1977 and the summer of 1978, the Jasons met to determine what would happen once the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled from pre-Industrial Revolution levels. It was an arbitrary milestone, the doubling, but a useful one, as its inevitability was not in question; the threshold would most likely be breached by 2035.

The Jasons’ report to the Department of Energy, “The Long-Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate,” was written in an understated tone that only enhanced its nightmarish findings: Global temperatures would increase by an average of two to three degrees Celsius; Dust Bowl conditions would “threaten large areas of North America, Asia and Africa”; access to drinking water and agricultural production would fall, triggering mass migration on an unprecedented scale. “Perhaps the most ominous feature,” however, was the effect of a changing climate on the poles. Even a minimal warming “could lead to rapid melting” of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet contained enough water to raise the level of the oceans 16 feet.

MacDonald explained that he first studied the carbon-dioxide issue when he was about Pomerance’s age — in 1961, when he served as an adviser to John F. Kennedy. Pomerance pieced together that MacDonald, in his youth, had been something of a prodigy: In his 20s, he advised Dwight D. Eisenhower on space exploration; at 32, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences; at 40, he was appointed to the inaugural Council on Environmental Quality, where he advised Richard Nixon on the environmental dangers of burning coal. He monitored the carbon-dioxide problem the whole time, with increasing alarm.

They were surprised to learn how few senior officials were familiar with the Jasons’ findings, let alone understood the ramifications of global warming. At last, having worked their way up the federal hierarchy, the two went to see the president’s top scientist, Frank Press.

Thus began the Gordon and Rafe carbon-dioxide roadshow. Beginning in the spring of 1979, Pomerance arranged informal briefings with the E.P.A., the National Security Council, The New York Times, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Energy Department, which, Pomerance learned, had established an Office of Carbon Dioxide Effects two years earlier at MacDonald’s urging

. Out of respect for MacDonald, Press had summoned to their meeting what seemed to be the entire senior staff of the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy — the officials consulted on every critical matter of energy and national security. What Pomerance had expected to be yet another casual briefing assumed the character of a high-level national-security meeting.

MacDonald would begin his presentation by going back more than a century to John Tyndall — an Irish physicist who was an early champion of Charles Darwin’s work and died after being accidentally poisoned by his wife. In 1859, Tyndall found that carbon dioxide absorbed heat and that variations in the composition of the atmosphere could create changes in climate. These findings inspired Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist and future Nobel laureate, to deduce in 1896 that the combustion of coal and petroleum could raise global temperatures. This warming would become noticeable in a few centuries, Arrhenius calculated, or sooner if consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase.

Four decades later, a British steam engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar discovered that, at the weather stations he observed, the previous five years were the hottest in recorded history. Humankind, he wrote in a paper, had become “able to speed up the processes of Nature.” That was in 1939.

MacDonald’s history concluded with Roger Revelle, perhaps the most distinguished of the priestly caste of government scientists who, since the Manhattan Project, advised every president on major policy; he had been a close colleague of MacDonald and Press since they served together under Kennedy. In a 1957 paper written with Hans Suess, Revelle concluded that “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Revelle helped the Weather Bureau establish a continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide at a site perched near the summit of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii, 11,500 feet above the sea — a rare pristine natural laboratory on a planet blanketed by fossil-fuel emissions.

After nearly a decade of observation, Revelle had shared his concerns with Lyndon Johnson, who included them in a special message to Congress two weeks after his inauguration. Johnson explained that his generation had “altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale” through the burning of fossil fuels, and his administration commissioned a study of the subject by his Science Advisory Committee. Revelle was its chairman, and its 1965 executive report on carbon dioxide warned of the rapid melting of Antarctica, rising seas, increased acidity of fresh waters — changes that would require no less than a coordinated global effort to forestall.Yet emissions continued to rise, and at this rate, MacDonald warned, they could see a snowless New England, the swamping of major coastal cities, as much as a 40 percent decline in national wheat production, the forced migration of about one-quarter of the world’s population. Not within centuries — within their own lifetimes.

On May 22, Press wrote a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences requesting a full assessment of the carbon-dioxide issue. Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology, would gather the nation’s top oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and climate modelers to judge whether MacDonald’s alarm was justified — whether the world was, in fact, headed to cataclysm.

If Charney’s group confirmed that the world was careering toward an existential crisis, the president would be forced to act.

Hansen turned from the moon to Venus. Why, he tried to determine, was its surface so hot? In 1967, a Soviet satellite beamed back the answer: The planet’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide. Though once it may have had habitable temperatures, it was believed to have succumbed to a runaway greenhouse effect: As the sun grew brighter, Venus’s ocean began to evaporate, thickening the atmosphere, which forced yet greater evaporation — a self-perpetuating cycle that finally boiled off the ocean entirely and heated the planet’s surface to more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit

At the other extreme, Mars’s thin atmosphere had insufficient carbon dioxide to trap much heat at all, leaving it about 900 degrees colder. Earth lay in the middle, its Goldilocks greenhouse effect just strong enough to support life.

We want to learn more about Earth’s climate, Jim told Anniek — and how humanity can influence it. He would use giant new supercomputers to map the planet’s atmosphere. They would create Mirror Worlds: parallel realities that mimicked our own. These digital simulacra, technically called “general circulation models,” combined the mathematical formulas that governed the behavior of the sea, land and sky into a single computer model. Unlike the real world, they could be sped forward to reveal the future.

The government officials, many of them scientists themselves, tried to suppress their awe of the legends in their presence: Henry Stommel, the world’s leading oceanographer; his protégé, Carl Wunsch, a Jason; the Manhattan Project alumnus Cecil Leith; the Harvard planetary physicist Richard Goody. These were the men who, in the last three decades, had discovered foundational principles underlying the relationships among sun, atmosphere, land and ocean — which is to say, the climate.

When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos.

The discrepancy between the models, Arakawa concluded, came down to ice and snow. The whiteness of the world’s snowfields reflected light; if snow melted in a warmer climate, less radiation would escape the atmosphere, leading to even greater warming. Shortly before dawn, Arakawa concluded that Manabe had given too little weight to the influence of melting sea ice, while Hansen had overemphasized it. The best estimate lay in between. Which meant that the Jasons’ calculation was too optimistic. When carbon dioxide doubled in 2035 or thereabouts, global temperatures would increase between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius, with the most likely outcome a warming of three degrees.

within the highest levels of the federal government, the scientific community and the oil-and-gas industry — within the commonwealth of people who had begun to concern themselves with the future habitability of the planet — the Charney report would come to have the authority of settled fact. It was the summation of all the predictions that had come before, and it would withstand the scrutiny of the decades that followed it. Charney’s group had considered everything known about ocean, sun, sea, air and fossil fuels and had distilled it to a single number: three. When the doubling threshold was broached, as appeared inevitable, the world would warm three degrees Celsius

The last time the world was three degrees warmer was during the Pliocene, three million years ago, when beech trees grew in Antarctica, the seas were 80 feet higher and horses galloped across the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean.

After the publication of the Charney report, Exxon decided to create its own dedicated carbon-dioxide research program, with an annual budget of $600,000. Only Exxon was asking a slightly different question than Jule Charney. Exxon didn’t concern itself primarily with how much the world would warm. It wanted to know how much of the warming Exxon could be blamed for.

“It behooves us to start a very aggressive defensive program,” Shaw wrote in a memo to a manager, “because there is a good probability that legislation affecting our business will be passed.”

Shaw turned to Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University oceanographer who was the second author of Roger Revelle’s 1965 carbon-dioxide report for Lyndon Johnson. In 1977, in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Broecker predicted that fossil fuels would have to be restricted, whether by taxation or fiat. More recently, he had testified before Congress, calling carbon dioxide “the No.1 long-term environmental problem.” If presidents and senators trusted Broecker to tell them the bad news, he was good enough for Exxon.

The company had been studying the carbon-dioxide problem for decades, since before it changed its name to Exxon. In 1957, scientists from Humble Oil published a study tracking “the enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” contributed to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution “from the combustion of fossil fuels.” Even then, the observation that burning fossil fuels had increased the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was well understood and accepted by Humble’s scientists.

The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade association, asked the same question in 1958 through its air-pollution study group and replicated the findings made by Humble Oil. So did another A.P.I. study conducted by the Stanford Research Institute a decade later, in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas.

The ritual repeated itself every few years. Industry scientists, at the behest of their corporate bosses, reviewed the problem and found good reasons for alarm and better excuses to do nothing. Why should they act when almost nobody within the United States government — nor, for that matter, within the environmental movement — seemed worried?

Why take on an intractable problem that would not be detected until this generation of employees was safely retired? Worse, the solutions seemed more punitive than the problem itself. Historically, energy use had correlated to economic growth — the more fossil fuels we burned, the better our lives became. Why mess with that?

That June, Jimmy Carter signed the Energy Security Act of 1980, which directed the National Academy of Sciences to start a multiyear, comprehensive study, to be called “Changing Climate,” that would analyze social and economic effects of climate change. More urgent, the National Commission on Air Quality, at the request of Congress, invited two dozen experts, including Henry Shaw himself, to a meeting in Florida to propose climate policy.

On April 3, 1980, Senator Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, held the first congressional hearing on carbon-dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. Gordon MacDonald testified that the United States should “take the initiative” and develop, through the United Nations, a way to coordinate every nation’s energy policies to address the problem.

During the expansion of the Clean Air Act, he pushed for the creation of the National Commission on Air Quality, charged with ensuring that the goals of the act were being met. One such goal was a stable global climate. The Charney report had made clear that goal was not being met, and now the commission wanted to hear proposals for legislation. It was a profound responsibility, and the two dozen experts invited to the Pink Palace — policy gurus, deep thinkers, an industry scientist and an environmental activist — had only three days to achieve it, but the utopian setting made everything seem possible

We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was.

William Elliott, a NOAA scientist, introduced some hard facts: If the United States stopped burning carbon that year, it would delay the arrival of the doubling threshold by only five years. If Western nations somehow managed to stabilize emissions, it would forestall the inevitable by only eight years. The only way to avoid the worst was to stop burning coal. Yet China, the Soviet Union and the United States, by far the world’s three largest coal producers, were frantically accelerating extraction.

“Do we have a problem?” asked Anthony Scoville, a congressional science consultant. “We do, but it is not the atmospheric problem. It is the political problem.” He doubted that any scientific report, no matter how ominous its predictions, would persuade politicians to act.

The talk of ending oil production stirred for the first time the gentleman from Exxon. “I think there is a transition period,” Henry Shaw said. “We are not going to stop burning fossil fuels and start looking toward solar or nuclear fusion and so on. We are going to have a very orderly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.”

What if the problem was that they were thinking of it as a problem? “What I am saying,” Scoville continued, “is that in a sense we are making a transition not only in energy but the economy as a whole.” Even if the coal and oil industries collapsed, renewable technologies like solar energy would take their place. Jimmy Carter was planning to invest $80 billion in synthetic fuel. “My God,” Scoville said, “with $80 billion, you could have a photovoltaics industry going that would obviate the need for synfuels forever!”

nobody could agree what to do. John Perry, a meteorologist who had worked as a staff member on the Charney report, suggested that American energy policy merely “take into account” the risks of global warming, though he acknowledged that a nonbinding measure might seem “intolerably stodgy.” “It is so weak,” Pomerance said, the air seeping out of him, “as to not get us anywhere.”

Scoville pointed out that the United States was responsible for the largest share of global carbon emissions. But not for long. “If we’re going to exercise leadership,” he said, “the opportunity is now.

One way to lead, he proposed, would be to classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and regulate it as such. This was received by the room like a belch. By Scoville’s logic, every sigh was an act of pollution. Did the science really support such an extreme measure? The Charney report did exactly that, Pomerance said.

Slade, the director of the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, considered the lag a saving grace. If changes did not occur for a decade or more, he said, those in the room couldn’t be blamed for failing to prevent them. So what was the problem?

“Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the United States could organize an international summit meeting to address climate change

these two dozen experts, who agreed on the major points and had made a commitment to Congress, could not draft a single paragraph. Hours passed in a hell of fruitless negotiation, self-defeating proposals and impulsive speechifying. Pomerance and Scoville pushed to include a statement calling for the United States to “sharply accelerate international dialogue,” but they were sunk by objections and caveats.

They never got to policy proposals. They never got to the second paragraph. The final statement was signed by only the moderator, who phrased it more weakly than the declaration calling for the workshop in the first place. “The guide I would suggest,” Jorling wrote, “is whether we know enough not to recommend changes in existing policy.”

Pomerance had seen enough. A consensus-based strategy would not work — could not work — without American leadership. And the United States wouldn’t act unless a strong leader persuaded it to do so — someone who would speak with authority about the science, demand action from those in power and risk everything in pursuit of justice.

The meeting ended Friday morning. On Tuesday, four days later, Ronald Reagan was elected president.

‘Otherwise, They’ll Gurgle’ November 1980-September 1981

In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could “permanently and disastrously” alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to “a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.” Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.

After the election, Reagan considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. “We’re deliriously happy,” the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter

Reagan “has declared open war on solar energy,” the director of the nation’s lead solar-energy research agency said, after he was asked to resign). Reagan appeared determined to reverse the environmental achievements of Jimmy Carter, before undoing those of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and, if he could get away with it, Theodore Roosevelt.

When Reagan considered closing the Council on Environmental Quality, its acting chairman, Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, wrote to the vice president and the White House chief of staff begging them to reconsider; in a major speech the same week, “A Conservative’s Program for the Environment,” Baldwin argued that it was “time for today’s conservatives explicitly to embrace environmentalism.” Environmental protection was not only good sense. It was good business. What could be more conservative than an efficient use of resources that led to fewer federal subsidies?

Meanwhile the Charney report continued to vibrate at the periphery of public consciousness. Its conclusions were confirmed by major studies from the Aspen Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Every month or so, nationally syndicated articles appeared summoning apocalypse: “Another Warning on ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ ” “Global Warming Trend ‘Beyond Human Experience,’ ” “Warming Trend Could ‘Pit Nation Against Nation.’

Pomerance read on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22, 1981, about a forthcoming paper in Science by a team of seven NASA scientists. They had found that the world had already warmed in the past century. Temperatures hadn’t increased beyond the range of historical averages, but the scientists predicted that the warming signal would emerge from the noise of routine weather fluctuations much sooner than previously expected. Most unusual of all, the paper ended with a policy recommendation: In the coming decades, the authors wrote, humankind should develop alternative sources of energy and use fossil fuels only “as necessary.” The lead author was James Hansen.

Pomerance listened and watched. He understood Hansen’s basic findings well enough: Earth had been warming since 1880, and the warming would reach “almost unprecedented magnitude” in the next century, leading to the familiar suite of terrors, including the flooding of a 10th of New Jersey and a quarter of Louisiana and Florida. But Pomerance was excited to find that Hansen could translate the complexities of atmospheric science into plain English.

7. ‘We’re All Going to Be the Victims’ March 1982

Gore had learned about climate change a dozen years earlier as an undergraduate at Harvard, when he took a class taught by Roger Revelle. Humankind was on the brink of radically transforming the global atmosphere, Revelle explained, drawing Keeling’s rising zigzag on the blackboard, and risked bringing about the collapse of civilization. Gore was stunned: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this?

Most in Congress considered the science committee a legislative backwater, if they considered it at all; this made Gore’s subcommittee, which had no legislative authority, an afterthought to an afterthought. That, Gore vowed, would change. Environmental and health stories had all the elements of narrative drama: villains, victims and heroes. In a hearing, you could summon all three, with the chairman serving as narrator, chorus and moral authority. He told his staff director that he wanted to hold a hearing every week.

The Revelle hearing went as Grumbly had predicted. The urgency of the issue was lost on Gore’s older colleagues, who drifted in and out while the witnesses testified. There were few people left by the time the Brookings Institution economist Lester Lave warned that humankind’s profligate exploitation of fossil fuels posed an existential test to human nature. “Carbon dioxide stands as a symbol now of our willingness to confront the future,” he said. “It will be a sad day when we decide that we just don’t have the time or thoughtfulness to address those issues.”

That night, the news programs featured the resolution of the baseball strike, the ongoing budgetary debate and the national surplus of butter.

There emerged, despite the general comity, a partisan divide. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans demanded action. “Today I have a sense of déjà vu,” said Robert Walker, a Republican from Pennsylvania. In each of the last five years, he said, “we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.”

Hansen flew to Washington to testify on March 25, 1982, performing before a gallery even more thinly populated than at Gore’s first hearing on the greenhouse effect. Gore began by attacking the Reagan administration for cutting funding for carbon-dioxide research despite the “broad consensus in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is a reality.” William Carney, a Republican from New York, bemoaned the burning of fossil fuels and argued passionately that science should serve as the basis for legislative policy

the experts invited by Gore agreed with the Republicans: The science was certain enough. Melvin Calvin, a Berkeley chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the carbon cycle, said that it was useless to wait for stronger evidence of warming. “You cannot do a thing about it when the signals are so big that they come out of the noise,” he said. “You have to look for early warning signs.”

Hansen’s job was to share the warning signs, to translate the data into plain English. He explained a few discoveries that his team had made — not with computer models but in libraries. By analyzing records from hundreds of weather stations, he found that the surface temperature of the planet had already increased four-tenths of a degree Celsius in the previous century. Data from several hundred tide-gauge stations showed that the oceans had risen four inches since the 1880s

It occurred to Hansen that this was the only political question that mattered: How long until the worst began? It was not a question on which geophysicists expended much effort; the difference between five years and 50 years in the future was meaningless in geologic time. Politicians were capable of thinking only in terms of electoral time: six years, four years, two years. But when it came to the carbon problem, the two time schemes were converging.

“Within 10 or 20 years,” Hansen said, “we will see climate changes which are clearly larger than the natural variability.” James Scheuer wanted to make sure he understood this correctly. No one else had predicted that the signal would emerge that quickly. “If it were one or two degrees per century,” he said, “that would be within the range of human adaptability. But we are pushing beyond the range of human adaptability.” “Yes,” Hansen said.

How soon, Scheuer asked, would they have to change the national model of energy production? Hansen hesitated — it wasn’t a scientific question. But he couldn’t help himself. He had been irritated, during the hearing, by all the ludicrous talk about the possibility of growing more trees to offset emissions. False hopes were worse than no hope at all: They undermined the prospect of developing real solutions. “That time is very soon,” Hansen said finally. “My opinion is that it is past,” Calvin said, but he was not heard because he spoke from his seat. He was told to speak into the microphone. “It is already later,” Calvin said, “than you think.”

From Gore’s perspective, the hearing was an unequivocal success. That night Dan Rather devoted three minutes of “CBS Evening News” to the greenhouse effect. A correspondent explained that temperatures had increased over the previous century, great sheets of pack ice in Antarctica were rapidly melting, the seas were rising; Calvin said that “the trend is all in the direction of an impending catastrophe”; and Gore mocked Reagan for his shortsightedness. Later, Gore could take credit for protecting the Energy Department’s carbon-dioxide program, which in the end was largely preserved.

8. ‘The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe’ 1982

Following Henry Shaw’s recommendation to establish credibility ahead of any future legislative battles, Exxon had begun to spend conspicuously on global-warming research. It donated tens of thousands of dollars to some of the most prominent research efforts, including one at Woods Hole led by the ecologist George Woodwell, who had been calling for major climate policy as early as the mid-1970s, and an international effort coordinated by the United Nations. Now Shaw offered to fund the October 1982 symposium on climate change at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty campus.

David boasted that Exxon would usher in a new global energy system to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. He went so far as to argue that capitalism’s blind faith in the wisdom of the free market was “less than satisfying” when it came to the greenhouse effect. Ethical considerations were necessary, too. He pledged that Exxon would revise its corporate strategy to account for climate change, even if it were not “fashionable” to do so. As Exxon had already made heavy investments in nuclear and solar technology, he was “generally upbeat” that Exxon would “invent” a future of renewable energy.

Hansen had reason to feel upbeat himself. If the world’s largest oil-and-gas company supported a new national energy model, the White House would not stand in its way. The Reagan administration was hostile to change from within its ranks. But it couldn’t be hostile to Exxon.

The carbon-dioxide issue was beginning to receive major national attention — Hansen’s own findings had become front-page news, after all. What started as a scientific story was turning into a political story.

The political realm was itself a kind of Mirror World, a parallel reality that crudely mimicked our own. It shared many of our most fundamental laws, like the laws of gravity and inertia and publicity. And if you applied enough pressure, the Mirror World of politics could be sped forward to reveal a new future. Hansen was beginning to understand that too.

1. ‘Caution, Not Panic’ 1983-1984

in the fall of 1983, the climate issue entered an especially long, dark winter. And all because of a single report that had done nothing to change the state of climate science but transformed the state of climate politics.

After the publication of the Charney report in 1979, Jimmy Carter had directed the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a comprehensive, $1 million analysis of the carbon-dioxide problem: a Warren Commission for the greenhouse effect. A team of scientist-dignitaries — among them Revelle, the Princeton modeler Syukuro Manabe and the Harvard political economist Thomas Schelling, one of the intellectual architects of Cold War game theory — would review the literature, evaluate the consequences of global warming for the world order and propose remedies

Then Reagan won the White House.

the incipient report served as the Reagan administration’s answer to every question on the subject. There could be no climate policy, Fred Koomanoff and his associates said, until the academy ruled. In the Mirror World of the Reagan administration, the warming problem hadn’t been abandoned at all. A careful, comprehensive solution was being devised. Everyone just had to wait for the academy’s elders to explain what it was.

The committee’s chairman, William Nierenberg — a Jason, presidential adviser and director of Scripps, the nation’s pre-eminent oceanographic institution — argued that action had to be taken immediately, before all the details could be known with certainty, or else it would be too late.

Better to bet on American ingenuity to save the day. Major interventions in national energy policy, taken immediately, might end up being more expensive, and less effective, than actions taken decades in the future, after more was understood about the economic and social consequences of a warmer planet. Yes, the climate would change, mostly for the worst, but future generations would be better equipped to change with it.

Government officials who knew Nierenberg were not surprised by his conclusions: He was an optimist by training and experience, a devout believer in the doctrine of American exceptionalism, one of the elite class of scientists who had helped the nation win a global war, invent the most deadly weapon conceivable and create the booming aerospace and computer industries. America had solved every existential problem it had confronted over the previous generation; it would not be daunted by an excess of carbon dioxide. Nierenberg had also served on Reagan’s transition team. Nobody believed that he had been directly influenced by his political connections, but his views — optimistic about the saving graces of market forces, pessimistic about the value of government regulation — reflected all the ardor of his party.

That’s what Nierenberg wrote in “Changing Climate.” But it’s not what he said in the press interviews that followed. He argued the opposite: There was no urgent need for action. The public should not entertain the most “extreme negative speculations” about climate change (despite the fact that many of those speculations appeared in his report). Though “Changing Climate” urged an accelerated transition to renewable fuels, noting that it would take thousands of years for the atmosphere to recover from the damage of the last century, Nierenberg recommended “caution, not panic.” Better to wait and see

The damage of “Changing Climate” was squared by the amount of attention it received. Nierenberg’s speech in the Great Hall, being one-500th the length of the actual assessment, received 500 times the press coverage. As The Wall Street Journal put it, in a line echoed by trade journals across the nation: “A panel of top scientists has some advice for people worried about the much-publicized warming of the Earth’s climate: You can cope.”

On “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather said the academy had given “a cold shoulder” to a grim, 200-page E.P.A. assessment published earlier that week (titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”; the E.P.A.’s answer, reduced to a word, was no). The Washington Post described the two reports, taken together, as “clarion calls to inaction.

George Keyworth II, Reagan’s science adviser. Keyworth used Nierenberg’s optimism as reason to discount the E.P.A.’s “unwarranted and unnecessarily alarmist” report and warned against taking any “near-term corrective action” on global warming. Just in case it wasn’t clear, Keyworth added, “there are no actions recommended other than continued research.”

Edward David Jr., two years removed from boasting of Exxon’s commitment to transforming global energy policy, told Science that the corporation had reconsidered. “Exxon has reverted to being mainly a supplier of conventional hydrocarbon fuels — petroleum products, natural gas and steam coal,” David said. The American Petroleum Institute canceled its own carbon-dioxide research program, too.

Exxon soon revised its position on climate-change research. In a presentation at an industry conference, Henry Shaw cited “Changing Climate” as evidence that “the general consensus is that society has sufficient time to technologically adapt to a CO₂ greenhouse effect.” If the academy had concluded that regulations were not a serious option, why should Exxon protest

2. ‘You Scientists Win’ 1985

3. The Size of The Human Imagination Spring-Summer 1986

Curtis Moore’s proposal: Use ozone to revive climate. The ozone hole had a solution — an international treaty, already in negotiation. Why not hitch the milk wagon to the bullet train? Pomerance was skeptical. The problems were related, sure: Without a reduction in CFC emissions, you didn’t have a chance of averting cataclysmic global warming. But it had been difficult enough to explain the carbon issue to politicians and journalists; why complicate the sales pitch? Then again, he didn’t see what choice he had. The Republicans controlled the Senate, and Moore was his connection to the Senate’s environmental committee.

Pomerance met with Senator John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, and helped persuade him to hold a double-barreled hearing on the twin problems of ozone and carbon dioxide on June 10 and 11, 1986

F.Sherwood Rowland, Robert Watson, a NASA scientist, and Richard Benedick, the administration’s lead representative in international ozone negotiations, would discuss ozone; James Hansen, Al Gore, the ecologist George Woodwell and Carl Wunsch, a veteran of the Charney group, would testify about climate change.

As Pomerance had hoped, fear about the ozone layer ensured a bounty of press coverage for the climate-change testimony. But as he had feared, it caused many people to conflate the two crises. One was Peter Jennings, who aired the video on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” warning that the ozone hole “could lead to flooding all over the world, also to drought and to famine.”

The confusion helped: For the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, global-warming headlines appeared by the dozen. William Nierenberg’s “caution, not panic” line was inverted. It was all panic without a hint of caution: “A Dire Forecast for ‘Greenhouse’ Earth” (the front page of The Washington Post); “Scientists Predict Catastrophes in Growing Global Heat Wave” (Chicago Tribune); “Swifter Warming of Globe Foreseen” (The New York Times).

After three years of backsliding and silence, Pomerance was exhilarated to see interest in the issue spike overnight. Not only that: A solution materialized, and a moral argument was passionately articulated — by Rhode Island’s Republican senator no less. “Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect can no longer be treated solely as important scientific questions,” Chafee said. “They must be seen as critical problems facing the nations of the world, and they are problems that demand solutions.”

The old canard about the need for more research was roundly mocked — by Woodwell, by a W.R.I. colleague named Andrew Maguire, by Senator George Mitchell, a Democrat from Maine. “Scientists are never 100 percent certain,” the Princeton historian Theodore Rabb testified. “That notion of total certainty is something too elusive ever to be sought.” As Pomerance had been saying since 1979, it was past time to act. Only now the argument was so broadly accepted that nobody dared object.

The ozone hole, Pomerance realized, had moved the public because, though it was no more visible than global warming, people could be made to see it. They could watch it grow on video. Its metaphors were emotionally wrought: Instead of summoning a glass building that sheltered plants from chilly weather (“Everything seems to flourish in there”), the hole evoked a violent rending of the firmament, inviting deathly radiation. Americans felt that their lives were in danger. An abstract, atmospheric problem had been reduced to the size of the human imagination. It had been made just small enough, and just large enough, to break through.

Four years after “Changing Climate,” two years after a hole had torn open the firmament and a month after the United States and more than three dozen other nations signed a treaty to limit use of CFCs, the climate-change corps was ready to celebrate. It had become conventional wisdom that climate change would follow ozone’s trajectory. Reagan’s E.P.A. administrator, Lee M. Thomas, said as much the day he signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (the successor to the Vienna Convention), telling reporters that global warming was likely to be the subject of a future international agreement

Congress had already begun to consider policy — in 1987 alone, there were eight days of climate hearings, in three committees, across both chambers of Congress; Senator Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, had introduced legislation to establish a national climate-change strategy. And so it was that Jim Hansen found himself on Oct. 27 in the not especially distinguished ballroom of the Quality Inn on New Jersey Avenue, a block from the Capitol, at “Preparing for Climate Change,” which was technically a conference but felt more like a wedding.

John Topping was an old-line Rockefeller Republican, a Commerce Department lawyer under Nixon and an E.P.A. official under Reagan. He first heard about the climate problem in the halls of the E.P.A. in 1982 and sought out Hansen, who gave him a personal tutorial. Topping was amazed to discover that out of the E.P.A.’s 13,000-person staff, only seven people, by his count, were assigned to work on climate, though he figured it was more important to the long-term security of the nation than every other environmental issue combined.

Glancing around the room, Jim Hansen could chart, like an arborist counting rings on a stump, the growth of the climate issue over the decade. Veterans like Gordon MacDonald, George Woodwell and the environmental biologist Stephen Schneider stood at the center of things. Former and current staff members from the congressional science committees (Tom Grumbly, Curtis Moore, Anthony Scoville) made introductions to the congressmen they advised. Hansen’s owlish nemesis Fred Koomanoff was present, as were his counterparts from the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Rafe Pomerance’s cranium could be seen above the crowd, but unusually he was surrounded by colleagues from other environmental organizations that until now had shown little interest in a diffuse problem with no proven fund-raising record. The party’s most conspicuous newcomers, however, the outermost ring, were the oil-and-gas executives.

That evening, as a storm spat and coughed outside, Rafe Pomerance gave one of his exhortative speeches urging cooperation among the various factions, and John Chafee and Roger Revelle received awards; introductions were made and business cards earnestly exchanged. Not even a presentation by Hansen of his research could sour the mood. The next night, on Oct. 28, at a high-spirited dinner party in Topping’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, the oil-and-gas men joked with the environmentalists, the trade-group representatives chatted up the regulators and the academics got merrily drunk. Mikhail Budyko, the don of the Soviet climatologists, settled into an extended conversation about global warming with Topping’s 10-year-old son. It all seemed like the start of a grand bargain, a uniting of factions — a solution.

Hansen was accustomed to the bureaucratic nuisances that attended testifying before Congress; before a hearing, he had to send his formal statement to NASA headquarters, which forwarded it to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval. “Major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty,” he had written. “By the 2010s [in every scenario], essentially the entire globe has very substantial warming.”

By all appearances, plans for major policy continued to advance rapidly. After the Johnston hearing, Timothy Wirth, a freshman Democratic senator from Colorado on the energy committee, began to plan a comprehensive package of climate-change legislation — a New Deal for global warming. Wirth asked a legislative assistant, David Harwood, to consult with experts on the issue, beginning with Rafe Pomerance, in the hope of converting the science of climate change into a new national energy policy.

In March 1988, Wirth joined 41 other senators, nearly half of them Republicans, to demand that Reagan call for an international treaty modeled after the ozone agreement. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were the world’s two largest contributors of carbon emissions, responsible for about one-third of the world total, they should lead the negotiations. Reagan agreed. In May, he signed a joint statement with Mikhail Gorbachev that included a pledge to cooperate on global warming.

Al Gore himself had, for the moment, withdrawn his political claim to the issue. In 1987, at the age of 39, Gore announced that he was running for president, in part to bring attention to global warming, but he stopped emphasizing it after the subject failed to captivate New Hampshire primary voters.

5. ‘You Will See Things That You Shall Believe’ Summer 1988

It was the hottest and driest summer in history. Everywhere you looked, something was bursting into flames. Two million acres in Alaska incinerated, and dozens of major fires scored the West. Yellowstone National Park lost nearly one million acres. Smoke was visible from Chicago, 1,600 miles away.

In Nebraska, suffering its worst drought since the Dust Bowl, there were days when every weather station registered temperatures above 100 degrees. The director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment warned that the drought might be the dawning of a climatic change that within a half century could turn the state into a desert.

On June 22 in Washington, where it hit 100 degrees, Rafe Pomerance received a call from Jim Hansen, who was scheduled to testify the following morning at a Senate hearing called by Timothy Wirth. “I hope we have good media coverage tomorrow,” Hansen said.

Hansen had just received the most recent global temperature data. Just over halfway into the year, 1988 was setting records. Already it had nearly clinched the hottest year in history. Ahead of schedule, the signal was emerging from the noise. “I’m going to make a pretty strong statement,” Hansen said.

Hansen returned to his testimony. He wrote: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” He wrote: “1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will be the warmest year on record.” He wrote: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

“We have only one planet,” Senator Bennett Johnston intoned. “If we screw it up, we have no place to go.” Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, called for the United Nations Environment Program to begin preparing a global remedy to the carbon-dioxide problem. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat of Arkansas, previewed Hansen’s testimony, saying that it “ought to be cause for headlines in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning.” The coverage, Bumpers emphasized, was a necessary precursor to policy. “Nobody wants to take on any of the industries that produce the things that we throw up into the atmosphere,” he said. “But what you have are all these competing interests pitted against our very survival.”

Hansen, wiping his brow, spoke without affect, his eyes rarely rising from his notes. The warming trend could be detected “with 99 percent confidence,” he said. “It is changing our climate now.” But he saved his strongest comment for after the hearing, when he was encircled in the hallway by reporters. “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he said, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

The press followed Bumpers’s advice. Hansen’s testimony prompted headlines in dozens of newspapers across the country, including The New York Times, which announced, across the top of its front page: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

Rafe Pomerance called his allies on Capitol Hill, the young staff members who advised politicians, organized hearings, wrote legislation. We need to finalize a number, he told them, a specific target, in order to move the issue — to turn all this publicity into policy. The Montreal Protocol had called for a 50 percent reduction in CFC emissions by 1998. What was the right target for carbon emissions? It wasn’t enough to exhort nations to do better. That kind of talk might sound noble, but it didn’t change investments or laws. They needed a hard goal — something ambitious but reasonable. And they needed it soon: Just four days after Hansen’s star turn, politicians from 46 nations and more than 300 scientists would convene in Toronto at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, an event described by Philip Shabecoff of The New York Times as “Woodstock for climate change.”

Pomerance had a proposal: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2000. Ambitious, Harwood said. In all his work planning climate policy, he had seen no assurance that such a steep drop in emissions was possible. Then again, 2000 was more than a decade off, so it allowed for some flexibility.

Mintzer pointed out that a 20 percent reduction was consistent with the academic literature on energy efficiency. Various studies over the years had shown that you could improve efficiency in most energy systems by roughly 20 percent if you adopted best practices.

Of course, with any target, you had to take into account the fact that the developing world would inevitably consume much larger quantities of fossil fuels by 2000. But those gains could be offset by a wider propagation of the renewable technologies already at hand — solar, wind, geothermal. It was not a rigorous scientific analysis, Mintzer granted, but 20 percent sounded plausible. We wouldn’t need to solve cold fusion or ask Congress to repeal the law of gravity. We could manage it with the knowledge and technology we already had.

Besides, Pomerance said, 20 by 2000 sounds good.

The conference’s final statement, signed by all 400 scientists and politicians in attendance, repeated the demand with a slight variation: a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2005. Just like that, Pomerance’s best guess became global diplomatic policy.

Hansen, emerging from Anniek’s successful cancer surgery, took it upon himself to start a one-man public information campaign. He gave news conferences and was quoted in seemingly every article about the issue; he even appeared on television with homemade props. Like an entrant at an elementary-school science fair, he made “loaded dice” out of sections of cardboard and colored paper to illustrate the increased likelihood of hotter weather in a warmer climate. Public awareness of the greenhouse effect reached a new high of 68 percent

global warming became a major subject of the presidential campaign. While Michael Dukakis proposed tax incentives to encourage domestic oil production and boasted that coal could satisfy the nation’s energy needs for the next three centuries, George Bush took advantage. “I am an environmentalist,” he declared on the shore of Lake Erie, the first stop on a five-state environmental tour that would take him to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s home turf. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect,” he said, “are forgetting about the White House effect.”

His running mate emphasized the ticket’s commitment to the issue at the vice-presidential debate. “The greenhouse effect is an important environmental issue,” Dan Quayle said. “We need to get on with it. And in a George Bush administration, you can bet that we will.”

This kind of talk roused the oil-and-gas men. “A lot of people on the Hill see the greenhouse effect as the issue of the 1990s,” a gas lobbyist told Oil & Gas Journal. Before a meeting of oil executives shortly after the “environmentalist” candidate won the election, Representative Dick Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, warned, “It’s going to be very difficult to fend off some kind of gasoline tax.” The coal industry, which had the most to lose from restrictions on carbon emissions, had moved beyond denial to resignation. A spokesman for the National Coal Association acknowledged that the greenhouse effect was no longer “an emerging issue. It is here already, and we’ll be hearing more and more about it.”

By the end of the year, 32 climate bills had been introduced in Congress, led by Wirth’s omnibus National Energy Policy Act of 1988. Co-sponsored by 13 Democrats and five Republicans, it established as a national goal an “International Global Agreement on the Atmosphere by 1992,” ordered the Energy Department to submit to Congress a plan to reduce energy use by at least 2 percent a year through 2005 and directed the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the feasibility of a carbon tax. A lawyer for the Senate energy committee told an industry journal that lawmakers were “frightened” by the issue and predicted that Congress would eventually pass significant legislation after Bush took office

The other great powers refused to wait. The German Parliament created a special commission on climate change, which concluded that action had to be taken immediately, “irrespective of any need for further research,” and that the Toronto goal was inadequate; it recommended a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions

Margaret Thatcher, who had studied chemistry at Oxford, warned in a speech to the Royal Society that global warming could “greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope” and that “the health of the economy and the health of our environment are totally dependent upon each other.”

The prime ministers of Canada and Norway called for a binding international treaty on the atmosphere; Sweden’s Parliament went further, announcing a national strategy to stabilize emissions at the 1988 level and eventually imposing a carbon tax

the United Nations unanimously endorsed the establishment, by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientists and policymakers, to conduct scientific assessments and develop global climate policy.

One of the I.P.C.C.’s first sessions to plan an international treaty was hosted by the State Department, 10 days after Bush’s inauguration. James Baker chose the occasion to make his first speech as secretary of state. “We can probably not afford to wait until all of the uncertainties about global climate change have been resolved,” he said. “Time will not make the problem go away.”

: On April 14, 1989, a bipartisan group of 24 senators, led by the majority leader, George Mitchell, requested that Bush cut emissions in the United States even before the I.P.C.C.’s working group made its recommendation. “We cannot afford the long lead times associated with a comprehensive global agreement,” the senators wrote. Bush had promised to combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. The self-proclaimed environmentalist was now seated in the Oval Office. It was time.

8. ‘You Never Beat The White House’ April 1989

After Jim Baker gave his boisterous address to the I.P.C.C. working group at the State Department, he received a visit from John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff. Leave the science to the scientists, Sununu told Baker. Stay clear of this greenhouse-effect nonsense. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Baker, who had served as Reagan’s chief of staff, didn’t speak about the subject again.

despite his reputation as a political wolf, he still thought of himself as a scientist — an “old engineer,” as he was fond of putting it, having earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. decades earlier. He lacked the reflexive deference that so many of his political generation reserved for the class of elite government scientists.

Since World War II, he believed, conspiratorial forces had used the imprimatur of scientific knowledge to advance an “anti-growth” doctrine. He reserved particular disdain for Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” which prophesied that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death if the world took no step to curb population growth; the Club of Rome, an organization of European scientists, heads of state and economists, which similarly warned that the world would run out of natural resources; and as recently as the mid-’70s, the hypothesis advanced by some of the nation’s most celebrated scientists — including Carl Sagan, Stephen Schneider and Ichtiaque Rasool — that a new ice age was dawning, thanks to the proliferation of man-made aerosols. All were theories of questionable scientific merit, portending vast, authoritarian remedies to halt economic progress.

When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the exchange to the press.

A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker, who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”

9. ‘A Form of Science Fraud’ May 1989

The cameras followed Hansen and Gore into the marbled hallway. Hansen insisted that he wanted to focus on the science. Gore focused on the politics. “I think they’re scared of the truth,” he said. “They’re scared that Hansen and the other scientists are right and that some dramatic policy changes are going to be needed, and they don’t want to face up to it.”

The censorship did more to publicize Hansen’s testimony and the dangers of global warming than anything he could have possibly said. At the White House briefing later that morning, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that Hansen’s statement had been changed. He blamed an official “five levels down from the top” and promised that there would be no retaliation. Hansen, he added, was “an outstanding and distinguished scientist” and was “doing a great job.”

10. The White House Effect Fall 1989

The Los Angeles Times called the censorship “an outrageous assault.” The Chicago Tribune said it was the beginning of “a cold war on global warming,” and The New York Times warned that the White House’s “heavy-handed intervention sends the signal that Washington wants to go slow on addressing the greenhouse problem.”

Darman went to see Sununu. He didn’t like being accused of censoring scientists. They needed to issue some kind of response. Sununu called Reilly to ask if he had any ideas. We could start, Reilly said, by recommitting to a global climate treaty. The United States was the only Western nation on record as opposing negotiations.

Sununu sent a telegram to Geneva endorsing a plan “to develop full international consensus on necessary steps to prepare for a formal treaty-negotiating process. The scope and importance of this issue are so great that it is essential for the U.S. to exercise leadership.”

Sununu seethed at any mention of the subject. He had taken it upon himself to study more deeply the greenhouse effect; he would have a rudimentary, one-dimensional general circulation model installed on his personal desktop computer. He decided that the models promoted by Jim Hansen were a lot of bunk. They were horribly imprecise in scale and underestimated the ocean’s ability to mitigate warming. Sununu complained about Hansen to D. Allan Bromley, a nuclear physicist from Yale who, at Sununu’s recommendation, was named Bush’s science adviser. Hansen’s findings were “technical poppycock” that didn’t begin to justify such wild-eyed pronouncements that “the greenhouse effect is here” or that the 1988 heat waves could be attributed to global warming, let alone serve as the basis for national economic policy.

When a junior staff member in the Energy Department, in a meeting at the White House with Sununu and Reilly, mentioned an initiative to reduce fossil-fuel use, Sununu interrupted her. “Why in the world would you need to reduce fossil-fuel use?” he asked. “Because of climate change,” the young woman replied. “I don’t want anyone in this administration without a scientific background using ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ ever again,” he said. “If you don’t have a technical basis for policy, don’t run around making decisions on the basis of newspaper headlines.” After the meeting, Reilly caught up to the staff member in the hallway. She was shaken. Don’t take it personally, Reilly told her. Sununu might have been looking at you, but that was directed at me.

Reilly, for his part, didn’t entirely blame Sununu for Bush’s indecision on the prospect of a climate treaty. The president had never taken a vigorous interest in global warming and was mainly briefed about it by nonscientists. Bush had brought up the subject on the campaign trail, in his speech about the White House effect, after leafing through a briefing booklet for a new issue that might generate some positive press. When Reilly tried in person to persuade him to take action, Bush deferred to Sununu and Baker. Why don’t the three of you work it out, he said. Let me know when you decide

Relations between Sununu and Reilly became openly adversarial. Reilly, Sununu thought, was a creature of the environmental lobby. He was trying to impress his friends at the E.P.A. without having a basic grasp of the science himself.

Pomerance had the sinking feeling that the momentum of the previous year was beginning to flag. The censoring of Hansen’s testimony and the inexplicably strident opposition from John Sununu were ominous signs. So were the findings of a report Pomerance had commissioned, published in September by the World Resources Institute, tracking global greenhouse-gas emissions. The United States was the largest contributor by far, producing nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, and its contribution was growing faster than that of every other country. Bush’s indecision, or perhaps inattention, had already managed to delay the negotiation of a global climate treaty until 1990 at the earliest, perhaps even 1991. By then, Pomerance worried, it would be too late.

Pomerance tried to be more diplomatic. “The president made a commitment to the American people to deal with global warming,” he told The Washington Post, “and he hasn’t followed it up.” He didn’t want to sound defeated. “There are some good building blocks here,” Pomerance said, and he meant it. The Montreal Protocol on CFCs wasn’t perfect at first, either — it had huge loopholes and weak restrictions. Once in place, however, the restrictions could be tightened. Perhaps the same could happen with climate change. Perhaps. Pomerance was not one for pessimism. As William Reilly told reporters, dutifully defending the official position forced upon him, it was the first time that the United States had formally endorsed the concept of an emissions limit. Pomerance wanted to believe that this was progress.

All week in Noordwijk, Becker couldn’t stop talking about what he had seen in Zeeland. After a flood in 1953, when the sea swallowed much of the region, killing more than 2,000 people, the Dutch began to build the Delta Works, a vast concrete-and-steel fortress of movable barriers, dams and sluice gates — a masterpiece of human engineering. The whole system could be locked into place within 90 minutes, defending the land against storm surge. It reduced the country’s exposure to the sea by 700 kilometers, Becker explained. The United States coastline was about 153,000 kilometers long. How long, he asked, was the entire terrestrial coastline? Because the whole world was going to need this. In Zeeland, he said, he had seen the future.

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., has a habit of asking new graduate students to name the largest fundamental breakthrough in climate physics since 1979. It’s a trick question. There has been no breakthrough. As with any mature scientific discipline, there is only refinement. The computer models grow more precise; the regional analyses sharpen; estimates solidify into observational data. Where there have been inaccuracies, they have tended to be in the direction of understatement.

More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it

Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.

The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that the oil-and-gas industry always operated thus; while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the ’70s and ’80s were hardly good Samaritans, they did not start multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to distort the truth or try to brainwash children in elementary schools, as their successors would.

It was James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 that, for the first time since the “Changing Climate” report, made oil-and-gas executives begin to consider the issue’s potential to hurt their profits. Exxon, as ever, led the field. Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own

The American Petroleum Institute, after holding a series of internal briefings on the subject in the fall and winter of 1988, including one for the chief executives of the dozen or so largest oil companies, took a similar, if slightly more diplomatic, line. It set aside money for carbon-dioxide policy — about $100,000, a fraction of the millions it was spending on the health effects of benzene, but enough to establish a lobbying organization called, in an admirable flourish of newspeak, the Global Climate Coalition.

The G.C.C. was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed regulations, but on a whim, it added a press campaign, to be coordinated mainly by the A.P.I. It gave briefings to politicians known to be friendly to the industry and approached scientists who professed skepticism about global warming. The A.P.I.’s payment for an original op-ed was $2,000.

It was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid and automobile industries

In October 1989, scientists allied with the G.C.C. began to be quoted in national publications, giving an issue that lacked controversy a convenient fulcrum. “Many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings,” was the caveat that began to appear in articles on climate change.

The following year, when President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, the A.P.I. invested $1.8 million in a G.C.C. disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil-and-coal states joined Republicans to defeat the tax proposal, which later contributed to the Republicans’ rout of Democrats in the midterm congressional elections in 1994 — the first time the Republican Party had won control of both houses in 40 years

The G.C.C. spent $13 million on a single ad campaign intended to weaken support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed its parties to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent relative to 1990 levels. The Senate, which would have had to ratify the agreement, took a pre-emptive vote declaring its opposition; the resolution passed 95-0. There has never been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate treaty.

. This has made the corporation an especially vulnerable target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in the last three years and may last a generation. Tort lawsuits have become possible only in recent years, as scientists have begun more precisely to attribute regional effects to global emission levels. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly sin

Pomerance had not been among the 400 delegates invited to Noordwijk. But together with three young activists — Daniel Becker of the Sierra Club, Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stewart Boyle from Friends of the Earth — he had formed his own impromptu delegation. Their constituency, they liked to say, was the climate itself. Their mission was to pressure the delegates to include in the final conference statement, which would be used as the basis for a global treaty, the target proposed in Toronto: a 20 percent reduction of greenhouse-gas combustion by 2005. It was the only measure that mattered, the amount of emissions reductions, and the Toronto number was the strongest global target yet proposed.

The delegations would review the progress made by the I.P.C.C. and decide whether to endorse a framework for a global treaty. There was a general sense among the delegates that they would, at minimum, agree to the target proposed by the host, the Dutch environmental minister, more modest than the Toronto number: a freezing of greenhouse-gas emissions at 1990 levels by 2000. Some believed that if the meeting was a success, it would encourage the I.P.C.C. to accelerate its negotiations and reach a decision about a treaty sooner. But at the very least, the world’s environmental ministers should sign a statement endorsing a hard, binding target of emissions reductions. The mood among the delegates was electric, nearly giddy — after more than a decade of fruitless international meetings, they could finally sign an agreement that meant something.

11. ‘The Skunks at The Garden Party’ November 1989

It was nearly freezing — Nov. 6, 1989, on the coast of the North Sea in the Dutch resort town of Noordwijk

Losing Earth: The Decade WeAlmost Stopped Climate Change We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts. By Nathaniel RichPhotographs and Videos by George Steinmetz AUG. 1, 2018

Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.

Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population

We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.

You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.

Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.

the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.

While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.

“The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”

These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.

While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.

The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil

Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”

Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”

the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.

. In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.

Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.

Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”

Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.

The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.

“Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”

I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.

when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were

And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.

The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.

it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.

it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.

There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.

it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.

It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.

And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.

We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.

So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.

He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.

Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?

to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.

Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.

So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means

nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.

I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.

So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?

Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.

something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it

— that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.

But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.

for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.

So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category

When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.

It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve

I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.

It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.

there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?

what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them

here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.

as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.

And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life

there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.

he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.

the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.

So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics

the concession.

So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.

The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.

He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.

The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.

so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?

here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.

he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.

He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X

How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?

I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.

So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.

the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community

So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.

And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.

When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.

He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.

I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.

King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.

There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.

What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.

And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.

that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.

How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.

there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.

King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.

for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.

This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.

And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.

So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question

it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.

I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.

But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.

What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?

BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.

But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.

And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.

that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.

The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.

How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.

It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.

And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.

he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?

He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.

BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.

So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.

then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.

Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.

as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.

And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.

it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.

BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.

That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.

so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.

one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.

That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community

I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy

King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.

for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.

today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.

BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.

Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.

there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.

So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.

where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.

When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.

King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.

where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow

How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?

n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.