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Stealing wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do. It just happened to be the easiest way to stop the tension.

The first time I made this connection was in first grade, sitting behind a girl named Clancy. The pressure had been building for days. Without knowing exactly why, I was overcome with frustration and had the urge to do something violent.

I liked Clancy and I didn’t want to steal from her. But I wanted my brain to stop pulsing, and some part of me knew it would help. So, carefully, I reached forward and unclipped the bow. Once it was in my hand, I felt better, as if some air had been released from an overinflated balloon. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care. I’d found a solution. It was a relief.

Together we went through the box. I explained what everything was and where it had come from. Once the box was empty, she stood and said we were going to return every item to its rightful owner, which was fine with me. I didn’t fear consequences and I didn’t suffer remorse, two more things I’d already figured out weren’t “normal.” Returning the stuff actually served my purpose. The box was full, and emptying it would give me a fresh space to store things I had yet to steal.

“Why did you take these things?” Mom asked me.I thought of the pressure in my head and the sense that I needed to do bad things sometimes. “I don’t know,” I said.“Well… Are you sorry?” she asked.“Yes,” I said. I was sorry. But I was sorry I had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because I had hurt anyone.

Empathy, like remorse, never came naturally to me. I was raised in the Baptist church. I knew we were supposed to feel bad about committing sins. My teachers talked about “honor systems” and something called “shame,” which I understood intellectually, but it wasn’t something I felt. My inability to grasp core emotional skills made the process of making and keeping friends somewhat of a challenge. It wasn’t that I was mean or anything. I was simply different.

Now that I’m an adult, I can tell you why I behaved this way. I can point to research examining the relationship between anxiety and apathy, and how stress associated with inner conflict is believed to subconsciously compel people to behave destructively. I believe that my urge to act out was most likely my brain’s way of trying to jolt itself into some semblance of “normal.” But none of this information was easy to find. I had to hunt for it. I am still hunting.

For more than a century, society has deemed sociopathy untreatable and unredeemable. The afflicted have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who either don’t understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy—like many personality disorders—exists on a spectrum.

After years of study, intensive therapy and earning a Ph.D. in psychology, I can say that sociopaths aren’t “bad” or “evil” or “crazy.” We simply have a harder time with feelings. We act out to fill a void. When I understood this about myself, I was able to control it.

It is a tragic misconception that all sociopaths are doomed to hopeless, loveless lives. The truth is that I share a personality type with millions of others, many of whom have good jobs, close-knit families and real friends. We represent a truth that’s hard to believe: There’s nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotion. I offer my story because I know I’m not alone.

a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible

What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism

Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted

As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”

F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”

Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.

The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation

Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change

There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions

It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years

We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires

That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”

Pressler and Patterson were heroes within the movement. Patterson led Baptist seminaries and became president of the convention. Pressler was a Texas state judge and a former president of the Council for National Policy, a powerful conservative Christian activist organization.

Both men are now disgraced. In 2018, the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired Patterson after it found that he’d grossly mishandled rape allegations — including writing in an email that he wanted to meet alone with a woman who had reported being raped to “break her down” — at both Southwestern and another Baptist seminary.

Pressler’s story is in some ways eerily similar to that of Harvey Weinstein. Both were powerful men so brazen about their misconduct that it was an “open secret” in their respective worlds. Yet they were also so powerful that an army of enablers coalesced around them, protecting them from the consequences of their actions.

The suit set off a sprawling investigation into S.B.C. sexual misconduct by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News. Their report, called “Abuse of Faith,” documented hundreds of sex abuse cases in the S.B.C. and led to the denomination commissioning an independent investigation of its handling of abuse.

The American right exists in a news environment that reports misconduct on the left or in left-wing institutions loudly and with granular detail. When Weinstein fell and that fall prompted the cascade of revelations that created the #MeToo moment, the right was overrun with commentary on the larger lessons of the episode, including scathing indictments of a Hollywood culture

the coverage, or lack thereof, of Pressler’s fall also helps explain why we’re so very polarized as a nation.

the bottom line is clear: For decades, survivors of sex abuse “were ignored, disbelieved or met with the constant refrain that the S.B.C. could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

the coverage on the right also fit a cherished conservative narrative: that liberal sexual values such as those in Hollywood invariably lead to abuse.

stories such as Pressler’s complicate this narrative immensely. If both the advocates and enemies of the sexual revolution have their Harvey Weinsteins — that is, if both progressive and conservative institutions can enable abuse — then all that partisan moral clarity starts to disappear

We’re all left with the disturbing and humbling reality that whatever our ideology or theology, it doesn’t make us good people. The allegedly virtuous “us” commits the same sins as the presumptively villainous “them.”

How does a typical conservative activist deal with this reality? By pretending it doesn’t exist.

Shortly after the Pressler settlement was announced, I looked for statements or commentary or articles by the conservative stalwarts who cover left-wing misconduct with such zeal. The silence was deafening.

I’m reminded of the minimal right-wing coverage of Fox News’s historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the largest known media defamation settlement of all time. I consistently meet conservatives who might know chapter and verse of any second-tier scandal in the “liberal media” but to this day have no clue that the right’s favorite news outlet broadcast some of the most expensive lies in history.

t’s more like a cultivated ignorance, in which news outlets and influencers and their audiences tacitly agree not to share facts that might complicate their partisan narratives.

the dynamic is even worse when stories of conservative abuse and misconduct break in the mainstream media. Conservative partisans can simply cry “media bias!” and rely on their followers to tune it all out. To those followers, a scandal isn’t real until people they trust say it’s real.

In other words, the Marshall Plan and the tech boom during the 1990s were products of their time and place. They wouldn’t necessarily have the desired effects in a modern context.

“A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind. A financial crisis shook the middle class. A pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains. A changing climate threatened lives and livelihoods. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the risks of overdependence.”

What was the solution? Instead of rampant globalization, Sullivan’s pitch was that a reenergized American economy made the country stronger. It was time to remake the Rust Belt into a Cobalt Corridor, to establish industries that led not only to blue-collar work but to azure-collared careers. If that was done right, a strengthened America could act more capably around the globe.

“By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges,” he said, citing China’s large-scale subsidization of multiple sectors that crushed America’s competitiveness across industries. Making matters worse, Sullivan continued, “economic integration didn’t stop China from expanding its military ambitions.” It also didn’t stop countries like Russia from invading their neighbors.

Implicitly, Sullivan said the main assumptions undergirding America’s foreign and economic policy had been wrong for decades. China, and the Washington belief that liberalized markets would eventually lead to democracy within the halls of power in Beijing, was the most glaring example.

“This moment demands that we forge a new consensus. That’s why the United States, under President Biden, is pursuing a modern industrial and innovation strategy — both at home and with partners around the world,

Standing in front of the esteemed audience, Sullivan was telling them he didn’t want to be caught flat-footed as the global economy reshaped around them. The U.S. government would be proactive, prepared and proud in search of an industrial strategy to undergird American power. Without saying the words, he was offering a plan to make America great again.

A self-proclaimed “A-Team” came together to move beyond the Trump era, but in some ways they embraced elements of it. Not the nativist demagoguery, but the need to return to fundamentals: a healthy middle class powered by a humming industrial base, a humility about what the U.S. military alone can accomplish, a solid cadre of allies, attention to the most existential threats and a refresh of the tenets that sustain American democracy.

“This strategy will take resolve — it will take a dedicated commitment to overcoming the barriers that have kept this country and our partners from building rapidly, efficiently, and fairly as we were able to do in the past,”

And why was the surge in illegal border crossings so troubling, even for voters who live far from the southern border? Not because they believe Mr. Trump’s florid demagogy about criminals, rapists and residents of mental hospitals pouring in but because they see a country unable to control its borders as a country unable to control its destiny

and as a country that treats strangers better than some of its citizens.

they are part of the same political project. Economic arrangements not only decide the distribution of income and wealth; they also determine the allocation of social recognition and esteem.

Democrats need to acknowledge that the neoliberal globalization project they and mainstream Republicans pursued in recent decades brought huge gains for those at the top but job loss and stagnant wages for most working people

The winners used their windfall to buy influence in high places. Government stopped trying to check concentrated economic power. The two parties joined forces to deregulate Wall Street. And when the financial crisis of 2008 pushed the system to the brink, they spent billions of dollars to bail out the banks but left ordinary homeowners mostly to fend for themselves.

Rather than contend directly with the damage they had done, both political parties told workers to improve themselves by getting college degrees.

The elites who offered this advice missed the implicit insult it contained: If you’re struggling in the new economy, it’s your fault.

as president, despite his centrist career, Mr. Biden turned away from the policies that had prompted populist backlash and empowered Mr. Trump.

Still, he remained unpopular. Mr. Biden and his team thought the problem was one of timing: Public investments take time to produce jobs and tangible benefits.

Mr. Biden’s ambitious public investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, jobs and clean energy recalled the muscular role of government during the New Deal. So did his support for collective bargaining and the revival of antitrust law. It made him one of the most consequential presidents of modern times.

But the real problem was more fundamental. Mr. Biden never really offered a broad governing vision, never explained how the policies he enacted added up to a new democratic project.

Mr. Biden offered no comparable story.When he broke with the era of neoliberal globalization, reasserting government’s role in regulating markets for the common good, he did so with little fanfare or explanation. He did not acknowledge that his own party had been complicit in the policies that had deepened the divide between winners and losers

Mr. Trump has proposed exempting tips from taxes. Well, here’s a bolder suggestion: Why not reduce or eliminate the payroll taxes employees pay and make up the revenue with a tax on financial transactions?

This made him a weak match for Mr. Trump, a candidate with little policy success but whose MAGA movement spoke to the anger of the age.

what does all of this mean for the Harris campaign?

Defeating Mr. Trump means taking seriously the divide between winners and losers that polarizes the country. It means acknowledging the resentment of working people who feel that the work they do is not respected, that elites look down on them, that they have little say in shaping the forces that govern their lives.

To do so, Ms. Harris should highlight a theme that has long been implicit but underdeveloped in Mr. Biden’s presidency: the dignity of work.

The Harris campaign should not only defend these achievements but also embark on something more ambitious: a project of democratic renewal that goes beyond merely saving democracy from Mr. Trump

democracy in its fullest sense is about citizens deliberating together about justice and the common good. The dignity of work is important to a healthy democracy because it enables everyone to contribute to the common good and to win honor and recognition for doing so.

For Ms. Harris, offering concrete proposals to honor work — and to reward it fairly — could force Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance to choose between the working-class party they hope to become and the corporate Republican Party they continue to be.

She should be asking questions that would invigorate progressive politics for the 21st century: If we really believe in the dignity of work, why do we tax income from labor at a higher rate than income from dividends and capital gains? Shouldn’t the federal minimum hourly wage be higher than $7.25?

in the end, it all made for impressive policy but themeless politics. His presidency was a legislative triumph but an evocative failure.

Beyond tax measures: What about public investment in universal child care not only to support those who work outside the home but also to improve the pay and working conditions of caregivers?

Democrats could promote sectoral bargaining so that fast food workers can negotiate wages and working conditions across their industry rather than company by company. Democrats could require companies to give employees seats on corporate boards and classify gig workers as employees

On climate change, rather than imposing top-down, technocratic solutions, what if we tried listening to those who fear their livelihoods will be upended — creating local forums that give workers in the fossil fuel industry and agriculture a chance to collaborate with community leaders, scientists and public officials in shaping the transition to a green economy?

The election season is too short, they might argue, and the stakes are too high; elevating the terms of public discourse is a project for another day.

But this would be a political mistake and a historic missed opportunity. Taunting Mr. Trump as a felon would rally the base but reinforce the divide. Offering Americans a more inspiring democratic project could change some minds, win over some voters and offer some hope for a less rancorous public life.

Even when they arrive at college wanting something very different, an increasing number of students at elite universities seek the imprimatur of employment by a powerful firm and “making a bag” (slang for a sack of money) as quickly as possible.

Elite universities have always been major feeders into finance and consulting, and students have always wanted to make money. According to the annual American Freshman Survey, the biggest increase in students wanting to become “very well off financially” happened between the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s been creeping up since then.

According to a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard Seniors, the share of 2024 graduates going into finance and consulting is 34 percent. (In 2022 and 2023 it exceeded 40 percent.

Another student, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer in a row practicing case studies in preparation for management consulting internship interviews, told me that everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me it was common at parties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.

“There’s definitely a herd mentality,” Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu, said. “If you’re not doing finance or tech, it can feel like you’re doing something wrong.”

As a freshman, he planned to major in environmental engineering. As a sophomore, he switched to economics, joining five of his six roommates. One of those roommates told me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the time he was in his 30s. Before that, he wanted to earn a good salary, which he defined as $500,000 a year.

But in the last five years, faculty and administrators say, the pull of these industries has become supercharged. In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition and inequality, students and their parents increasingly see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.

These statistics approach the previous highs in 2007, after which the global financial crisis drove the share down to a recent low of 20 percent in 2009, from which it’s been regaining ground since

Fifteen years ago, fewer students went into tech. Adding in that sector, the share of graduates starting what some students non-disparagingly refer to as “sellout jobs” is more than half. (It was a record-shattering 60 percent in 2022 and nearly 54 percent in 2023.)

“When people say ‘selling out,’ I mean, obviously, there’s some implicit judgment there,” said Aden Barton, a 23-year-old Harvard senior who wrote an opinion column for the student newspaper headlined, “How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom.”

“But it really is just almost a descriptive term at this point for people pursuing certain career paths,” he continued. “I’m not trying to denigrate anybody’s career path nor my own.” (He interned at a hedge fund last summer.)

David Halek, director of employer relations at Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, thinks students may use the term “sell out” because of the perceived certainty: “It’s the easy path to follow. It is well defined,” he said.

“It’s hard to conceptualize other things,” said Andy Wang, a social studies concentrator at Harvard who recently graduated.

Some students talk about turning to a different career later on, after they’ve made enough money. “Nowadays, English concentrators often say they’re going into finance or management consulting for a couple of years before writing their novel,” said James Wood, a Harvard professor of the practice of literary criticism.

And a surprising number of students explain their desire for a corporate job by drawing on the ethos of effective altruism: Whether they are conscious of the movement or not, they believe they can have greater impact by maximizing earnings to donate to a cause than working for that cause.

Roger Woolsey, executive director of the career center at Union College, a private liberal arts college in Schenectady, N.Y, said he first noticed a change around 2015, with students who had been in high school during the Great Recession and who therefore prioritized financial security.

that might be why students and their parents were much more focused on professional outcomes than they used to be. “In the past few years,” she said, “I’ve seen a higher level of interest in this first-destination data” — stats on what jobs graduates are getting out of college.

“The students saw what their parents went through, and the parents saw what happened to themselves,” he said. “You couple that with college tuition continuing to rise,” he continued, and students started looking for monetary payoffs right after graduation.

“Twenty years ago, an ‘introduction to investment banking’ event was held at the undergraduate library at Harvard,” said Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Forty students showed up, all men, and when asked to define ‘investment banking,’ none raised their hands.”

Now, according to Goldman Sachs, the bank had six times as many applicants this year for summer internships as it did 10 years ago, and was 20 percent more selective for this summer’s class than it was last year.

“Harvard is more diverse than ever before,” Mr. Contomanolis said, with nearly one in five students eligible for a low-income Pell Grant. Those students, he said, weigh whether to, for instance, “take a job back in my border town community in Texas and make a big impact in a kind of public service sense” or get a job with “a salary that would be life changing for my family.

according to The Harvard Crimson’s senior survey, as Mr. Barton noted in his opinion column, “The aggregate rate of ‘selling out’ is about the same — around 60 percent — for all income brackets.” The main distinction is that students from low-income families are comparatively more likely to go into technology than finance.

In other words, there is something additional at play, which Mr. Barton argues has to do with the nature of prestige. “If you tell me you’re working at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, that’s amazing, their eyes are going to light up,” Mr. Barton said. “If you tell somebody, ‘Oh, I took this random nonprofit job,’ or even a journalism job, even if you’re going to a huge name, it’s going to be a little bit of a question mark.”

“Even if you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life, it’s seen kind of as the golden standard of a smart, hardworking person,”

Matine Khalighi, 22, founded a nonprofit to award scholarships to homeless youth when he was in eighth grade. When he began studying economics at Harvard, his nonprofit, EEqual, was granting 50 scholarships a year. But some of the corporations that funded EEqual were contributing to inequality that created homelessness, he said. Philanthropy wasn’t the solution for systemic change, he decided. Instead, he turned to finance, with the idea that the sector could marshal capital quickly for social impact.

Part of that has to do with recruitment; the most prestigious banks and consulting firms do so only at certain colleges, and they have intensified their presence on those campuses in recent years. Over the last five years or so, “the idea of thinking about your professional path has moved much earlier in the undergraduate experience,” Ms. Ciesil said. She said the banks first began talking to students earlier, and it was the entrance of Big Tech onto the scene, asking for junior summer applications by the end of sophomore year, that accelerated recruitment timelines.

The marker that really distinguishes Gen Z is how pessimistic its members are, and how much they feel like life is beyond their control, according to Jean Twenge, a psychologist who analyzed data from national surveys of high school students and first-year college students in her book “Generations.”

Money, of course, helps give people a sense of control. And because of income inequality, “there’s this idea that you either make it or you don’t, so you better make it,” Ms. Twenge said.

Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard’s business and law schools, wrote a 2017 essay in The Crimson titled “The Trouble With Optionality,” arguing that students who habitually pursue the security of prestigious employment foreclose the risk-taking and longer-range thinking necessary for more unusual or idealistic achievements.

Mr. Desai believes that’s often because they are responding to the bigger picture, like threats to workers from artificial intelligence, and political and financial upheaval.

he’s observed two trends among students pursuing wealth. There’s “the option-buyer,” the student who takes a job in finance or consulting to buy more time or to keep options open. Then there’s what he calls “the lottery ticket buyer,” the students who go all-in on a risky venture, like a start-up or new technology, hoping to make a windfall.

In the last five years, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University and the former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, has noticed a new trend when he asks students in his American Political Thought classes to consider their future.

“Almost every discussion, someone will come in and say, ‘Well, I can go and make a lot of money and do more good with that money than I could by doing some kind of charitable or service profession,’” Mr. Montás said. “It’s there constantly — a way of justifying a career that is organized around making money.”

Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”

But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”

the more simulated human conversation I heard, the more it left me craving the real thing: in-person connections with the people I care about, with all the quirks of a meandering human discussion

the upside may be that it forces us to appreciate the subtleties of personal interactions that many of us have come to devalue.

I witnessed A.I. voice agents strike up conversations with one another, which raised a Zen-like question: If one A.I. voice agent tries to scam another, is anyone’s time being wasted?

As I provided my A.I. voice agent with more information about me and my life, it evolved into a more credible impersonator of me. Armed with my biography, it attended work meetings on my behalf (off-camera, of course), conducted interviews in my place and even attempted to negotiate business deals. My clone was better at arranging meetings than closing deals, though it handled an important legal conversation with aplomb.

Along the way, I discovered its singular talent: a knack for endless untruthful riffing that no human can match.

I’m talking about a bottomless capacity for mundane small talk, combined with the imperative to make things up just to keep the conversation going.

Even when my voice agent did a good job masquerading as me, I found that for the people on the other end of the line, having out-loud conversations with A.I. clones upended their sense of reality.

Companies are poised to unleash these A.I. voice agents into our world. We humans need to decide how we will adjust to a world flooded with near-human voices

we could try and reject this technology, carving out no-clone spaces and refusing to patronize the companies that offer a pseudo-human experience instead of a real one.

If there’s one thing we don’t need, it’s more loneliness, which seems to be the one thing these A.I. voices reliably supply. Their arrival offers a chance to rethink how we use our own voices and to seek out more of the human interactions that they can never replace.

What the Republicans denounce as Marxist or socialist would be considered moderate social democracy in Germany. Since the 1980s and 1990s, with figures like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, political radicalization has been a deliberate strategy to mobilize their voter base. Right-wing media significantly amplify this strategy. Without understanding this context, meaningful solutions to the problem cannot be found

Currently, it is the right that is mounting a fundamental assault on the system of checks and balances in the United States. They seek to greatly enhance the powers of the executive branch through the presidency, drastically reduce the size of the administration while ensuring loyalty to the president, expand presidential influence over the judiciary, and eliminate the independence of law enforcement and security agencies. These goals run counter to longstanding U.S. political traditions and the ideas of the Founding Fathers.

Recent research has shown that social disapproval provokes the brain's danger circuits. Conformity soothes.

We are often not even aware when we are conforming. It is our home base, our default mode.

To keep ourselves in the warm confines of conformity, we rely on two independent yet related types of social cues. First, we look to others for information about what's going on (informational cues). Second, we look for others to see what to do about it (normative cues).

We start to seek out these cues early. As the notion of self crystallizes in the second year of life, the child begins the effort to align the self socially. An infant who falls down looks up to the parents to gauge whether to cry. If mom reacts in fear, tears will follow. If the mother laughs and reassures — no tears.

This early attentiveness to informational cues is called "social referencing." Shortly after, the child also begins to align their behavior with those of the group by conforming to expectations to share, wait, or not hit (picking up on normative cues).

we use others to figure out what's going on. This can be a very good thing. Consultation, compromise, education, and information exchange are the levers of civilization

Informational cues, however, can also mislead us. Two quite random examples will illustrate: The 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast about an alien invasion led to panic because many people who missed the beginning of the broadcast turned to each other to find out what was going on, misinforming each other

Normative influences work because we depend on social acceptance to survive and thrive

In a classic '50s study, psychologist Solomon Asch told student participants they were to take a vision test. Participants in small groups were required to compare the length of lines. All the participants except one, however, were confederates who at some point began giving wrong answers. Overall, roughly 3/4 of the naïve subjects complied, adjusting their public judgment to conform to the group even though in their individual notes they indicated the right answer consistently. We use normative cues, in other words, to help us gain public acceptance.

Asch's work showed that people are reluctant to break with group norms even if the group is small, ad hoc, and made of complete strangers. But normative cues tend to be even more potent when they come from people whose friendship, love, and esteem we value

Looking outward, tight groups of friends will often make a decision that is bad for addressing the external situation because they seek to maintain internal cohesion.

For humans, both the problem and the solution are group-based. The group is the source of both conformity and rebellion. The dual system of informational and normative cues explains how social conformity spreads as the two types of cues converge (informational cues relay the messages and normative cues ensure compliance

But that dual system also explains social change over time as the cues diverge. Normative cues keep the majority opinion in power through public acceptance, while contradictory, informational cues, affecting private acceptance, may spread stealthily in the cultural underground until they gather sufficient momentum to rise and upend the old order.

n fact, effective nonconformity is in itself a group phenomenon. Psychological research from Asch's to Milgram's has shown time and again that, quite ironically, the presence of allies is the best predictor of nonconformist behavior. Our individual courage is a manifestation of group convictions and affiliations

The visible courageous individual is but the tip of a social iceberg. When you go against the group, you do it not on your own, but in the name — and with the backing — of another group

In other words, we can't avoid conformity. What we can do is raise our own consciousness and become more aware of conformity cues. Then we can try to find good information and the right allies who will help protect us from ourselves.

the alternative to that, which is admittedly less economically efficient, but much more likely to succeed in the real world, is to recognize that cleaner energy sources deliver some public good. They deliver a benefit of cleaner air, less air pollution and deaths and mortalities and asthma attacks and less climate damages. And to subsidize their production, so that we get more from the clean sources.

I do think that we are going to see basically the full range of all of those clean firm power generation technologies get trialed out over the next few years and have a chance to scale

what is going to be key to stopping, preventing the worst impacts of climate change is reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally as rapidly as possible.

where I see the future for nuclear in the West, and I think where the bulk of the industry and the investment now is focused is on smaller and more modular reactors that instead of trying to power a million people per reactor are trying to power 50,000 or 100,000 people, like a 1/10 or a 1/20 the size of a large scale reactor.

the challenge for electricity is really twofold, we have to cut emissions from the power sector, right? Which already is now the number two, used to be the number one, emitting sector of the economy. Since we have made some progress, electricity is now number two and transportation is edged into the number one position for biggest greenhouse gas polluting sector.

it is an important reality of complex energy systems that we need a complete team of resources, and we need a range of options because we’re a big, diverse country with different resource spaces, different geographic constraints and different values, frankly. So that some parts of the country really do want to build nuclear power or really do want to continue to use natural gas. Other parts don’t want to touch them.

I’m really struck by this International Energy Association estimate that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today

And that means that the bets on each individual one are so much smaller that you can build one for a billion dollars instead of $15 billion or $20 billion. And I think that makes it much more likely that we can get our muscle memory back and get the economies of scale and learning by doing and trained work force developed around building them in series. That’s going to be key to building low-cost reactors.

I think we have to add that to the message. It’s not saying that one outweighs the other or these trade-offs are easy, but it is an important element that we can’t forget. That the more transmission we build, the more wind and solar we build, the lower the air pollution and public health impacts on vulnerable communities are as well, and we can save tens of thousands of lives in the process.

And so there’s sort of an opportunity cost right now where until we’ve shut down the last coal plants and the last natural gas plants, every single megawatt-hour of new clean electricity, new energy efficiency that we can add to the grid that goes to replace a nuclear power plant is a wasted opportunity to accelerate our emissions reductions and get rid of those dirty fossil fuels.

here is a segment of the climate movement that just hates this part of the bill, hates this part of the theory, does not want to see a substantial part of our decarbonization pathway built around things that allow us to continue producing fossil fuels in a putatively cleaner way. And I think there’s also some skepticism that it really will work technically in the long run. What is that critique? And why aren’t you persuaded by it?

And so they don’t cost a whole lot to demonstrate. We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate, rather than billions of dollars. And so I’m confident that we’re going to see a lot of success there.

But what we need are technologies that are not constrained by the weather and are not constrained by a duration limit, that can go as long as we need them, whenever we need them. And that’s what we call the third category, which are firm resources or clean firm resources, because we want to replace the dirty ones with the clean ones. And so today, we rely on natural gas and coal and our existing nuclear fleet for that firm role. But if we want to build a clean energy system and we need all that new clean electricity, we’re going to need to build about an equivalent amount as we have coal and gas plants today of clean firm options, whether that’s new nuclear power plants, advanced geothermal or similar options like that.

it is a massive transformation of our energy system, right? We’re going to have to rewire the country and change the way we make and use energy from the way we produce it, to the way we transport it, to the way we consume it at a very large scale. And so, yeah, that is the statistic.

l, let me get at that point about revitalization, about trying to spread a lot of this money geographically, widely. When I’ve talked to the Biden administration about this bill, something they’re always very keen to tell me is that it isn’t just money, it is standards. This bill is full of standards.

Well, there’s two — I think, two elements of that critique. One is that fossil energy companies are themselves primarily responsible for our lack of progress on climate change. That because of their vested economic interests, they have actively disrupted efforts to confront climate change over the long haul. And so climate campaigners, in this view, are trying to delegitimize fossil fuel companies and industries as social actors, the same way that tobacco companies were villainized and basically delegitimized as legitimate corporate citizens. And so that’s an effort, that’s a political strategy, that’s meant to try to weaken the ability of oil and gas companies to impede progress.

And that is real value because every time we burn natural gas or coal, we’re consuming something that costs money. And if we can avoid that, then the wind and solar farms are effectively delivering value in the value of the avoided fuel, and of course, the social value of the avoided emissions.

let’s also not forget that the money talks, right? That finances is a necessary condition, if not sufficient. But what this bill does is aligns all of the financial incentives, or at least most of them, behind making the right clean energy choices. And without that, there’s no way we’re going to make progress at the pace we need

And geothermal, unlike a big nuclear plant, they’re really modular. You only need to build them in 5 or 10 megawatt increments

The first rule of holes is stop digging, right? Then you can figure out how to climb out

We’re going to see the first nuclear power plants built at the end of the decade. There are a variety of technologies that are getting licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commissio

re you confident that we have or are near to having the carbon-capture technologies to reliably capture, and store, or use carbon for very, very long periods of geologic time?

You shouldn’t expect everyone to just be altruistic. We have to make it make good financial sense for everyone to make the clean choice. And so there’s two ways to do that. You can make fossil energy more expensive to price in the true cost of consuming fossil fuels for society, which includes all of the climate damages that are going to occur down the line because of accelerating climate change, but also air pollution

We still have to go all the way from there to net-zero in 2050. And that, of course, is assuming that we can build transmission in wind and solar at the pace that makes economic sense. So if we can’t do that, we’re going to fall even further short. So this is a big step down the road to net zero, but it is not the last step we need to take. And we need to sustain and accelerate this transition.

the policy environment is now finally aligned to do that with the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law providing both demonstration funding for the first kind of n-of-a-kind, first handful of projects in all of those categories, as well as the first market-ready deployment subsidies, so that we can scale up, and drive down the cost, and improve the maturity and performance of all those technologies over the next 10 years as well, just as we did for wind and solar.

And so the role of wind and solar is effectively to displace the fuel consumption of other potentially more dependable resources in the grid, maybe not necessarily to shut down the power plant as a whole, but to use it less and less.

The last time Congress took up and failed to pass climate policy in 2009 and 2010, solar PV cost 10 times as much as it does today, and wind, onshore wind farms, cost three times as much as they do today. So we’ve seen a 90 percent decline in the cost of both solar PV and lithium ion batteries, which are the major cost component in electric vehicles and our main source of growing grid scale energy storage to help deal with the variability of wind and solar on the grid. And so those costs have come down by a factor of 10, and we’ve seen about a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind over the last decade. And that changes the whole game, right?

we tried them out, and we deployed them at scale, and we got better and better at it over time. And so we don’t need carbon capture at scale this decade. The things that are going to do all of the emissions reduction work, really, the bulk of it, are technologies that we bet on a decade ago and are ready to scale now. What we need to do over this next decade is to repeat that same kind of success that we had for wind and solar and batteries with the full portfolio of options that we think we might need at scale in the 2030s and 2040

Every year matters. Every tenth of a degree of warming matters in terms of the impacts and damages and suffering that can be avoided in the future. And so we need to get to net-zero emissions globally as rapidly as we can.

until we reach the point where the total emissions of climate-warming gases from human activities is exactly equaled out or more so by the removal of those same greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each year due to human activities, we’re basically contributing to the growing concentration of climate-warming gases in the atmosphere. And that’s what drives climate change, those cumulative emissions and the total atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases

let’s take the big picture of that. It gets called decarbonization, but as I understand it, basically every theory of how to hit net zero by 2050 looks like this — you make electricity clean, you make much more clean electricity, you make almost everything run on electricity, and then you mop up the kind of small industries or productive questions that we have not figured out how to make electric. Is that basically right?

nothing in this bill really changes our capacity to plan. There’s no central coordinator, or the federal government doesn’t have vast new powers to decide where things go. So I worry a little bit that we’re solving the money problem, but there’s a lot of other reasons we end up building things slowly and over budget than just money.

And so when I think about the challenge of decarbonization, I think about how you unlock feedback loops and how you change the political economy of decarbonization by disrupting current interests that might oppose clean energy transitions and building and strengthening interests that would support them

the other analogy I often use is that of a balanced diet. You can’t eat only bananas, and you don’t want to only eat burgers, you want to eat a diverse mix of different parts of your diet. And so whether it’s trying to have all the right star players playing the right position on the court or trying to balance out your diet, what we need to build is an effective energy system that consists of team of different roles. And we break it down in our research as basically three key roles.

There’s a second, and more substantial or tangible reason to oppose carbon capture, which is that if it perpetuates some amount of fossil fuel use — it’s going to be dramatically less than today — but some amount of fossil fuel use, then it also perpetuates some of the impacts of the extractive economy and the transport and processing of fossil fuels that have primarily been borne by low income and Black and Brown communities

I worry about those things too. Those were big emphasis points in the Net-Zero America Study. Once you start to really unpack the scale and pace of change that we’re talking about, you inevitably start to be concerned with some of those other kind of rate limiting factors that constrained how quickly we can make this transition.

you write and your colleagues write in the Net-Zero Report that, quote, “expanding the supply of clean electricity is a linchpin in all net-zero paths.”

achieving the required additions by 2030 of utility scale solar and wind capacity means installing 38 to 67 gigawatts a year on average. The U.S. single year record added capacity is 25 gigawatts, which we did in 2020. So we need to on average be somewhere between — be around doubling our best-ever year in solar and wind capacity installation year after year after year after year.

that’s a big role, but it’s not the only role that we have. And because their output is variable, as well as demand for electricity which goes up and down.

there’s basically two main reasons why electricity is such a key linchpin. The first is that it’s a carbon-free energy carrier. And by that I mean it’s a way to move energy around in our economy and convert it and make use of it that doesn’t emit any CO2 directly when we do use electricity.

And so, yeah, you do have to onboard new workers through apprenticeship programs and pay them prevailing wages if you want to build wind and solar projects.

The first is the one that wind and solar fill and other weather-dependent variable renewable resources. And we call those fuel-saving resources. If you think about what a wind farm is, it’s a bunch of steel, and copper, and capital that you invested upfront that then has no fuel costs.

so aligning the incentives isn’t sufficient, but it does mean we now have a lot more very clear reasons for a lot more constituents to try to get to work solving the next set of challenges. And so that’s a huge step forward.

We need a second key role, which we call fast-burst or balancing resources. And that’s where batteries, battery energy storage, as well as smart charging of electric vehicles or other ways to flexibly move around when we consume electricity

so if we can grow the share of carbon-free generation, we can decarbonize both the front end of the supply of our energy carriers. And then when we consume that carbon-free electricity on the other end, it doesn’t emit CO2 either. And there’s just a lot more ways to produce carbon-free electricity than there are to produce liquid fuels or gaseous fuels

we could avoid on the order of 35,000 premature deaths over the first decade of implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act due to the improvements in our clean energy economy, through the reduction of coal combustion and vehicle-related emissions.

I just don’t think we’re going to sustain the clean energy transition and diversify the set of communities that have a clear political stake in continuing that transition if we don’t drive some of these kinds of broad benefits that the bill is trying to do

And then when I talk to critics of the bill, one thing I hear is that a real problem is that this bill is full of standards. That if you just look at the decarbonization task — the land use we were talking about, the speed we need to do it. It is inhumanly hard already. But all over this bill is the tying of decarbonization money to other kinds of priorities,

If you think about what it would take to get 10 times as much political will to act, that’s a huge effort, right? There’s a lot of organizing. There’s a lot of transforming politics to get 10 times as much political will

then the challenge is we need to produce that electricity from a carbon-free source, and that’s the second reason why electricity is so key because we do actually have a lot of different ways to produce carbon-free electricity

one of the clear, tangible, near-term benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuel combustion, whether those are coal-fired power plants or buses or gasoline vehicles is that we’re going to substantially reduce fine particulate pollution and other ozone forming pollution that also creates smog and impacts urban air quality and air quality across the country

we need solutions that work in all of those contexts. And so keeping our options open, rather than trying to constrain them is definitely the lowest risk way to proceed these days. Because if you bet on a set of limited set of technologies, and you bet wrong, you’ve bet the planet, and you’ve failed. The stakes are that high.

we are going to need to enter a new era of nation building, right? A new era of investment in physical infrastructure that can build a better country. There are huge benefits associated with this, but are going to mean, we are going to see large-scale construction, and infrastructure, and impacts on lives

the Inflation Reduction Act is insufficient. It’s a huge step forward. But our estimation from the Repeat Project is that it cuts about two-thirds of the annual emissions gap that we need to close in 2030. It still leaves about a half a billion tons of emissions on the table that we need to tackle with additional policies. And that’s just 2030.

All of those decisions, we basically are putting the thumb on the scale heavily for the cleaner option over the dirtier option.

it took 140 years to build today’s power grid. Now, we have to build that much new clean electricity again and then build it again, so we have to build it twice over in just 30 years to hit our goals.

We, in the broad human sense, right? So Germany and Spain and China and the United States and a whole bunch of different countries decided to subsidize the deployment of those technologies when they were expensive, create early markets that drove innovation and cost declines and made them into tremendously affordable options for the future

“Making Climate Policy Work” by Danny Cullenward and David Victor, which explores the political economy and really real world history and experience of using market-based instruments, like carbon taxes or emissions cap and trade programs to try to tackle climate change. I think the book does a really good job of summarizing both a range of scholarship and the kind of real-world experience that we’ve gotten in the few places that have succeeded in implementing carbon pricing

what the Inflation Reduction Act does at its core is focus on making clean energy cheaper. And it does that in two main ways. The first way is with subsidies, right? So there’s a big package of tax credits that does the bulk of the work. But there’s also rebates for low-income households to do energy efficiency and electrification.

We built about 10 gigawatts of utility solar in 2020. The E.I.A. thinks we’ll build about 20 gigawatts this year. So things change, we can grow.

. Beyond wind and solar, what do you see as playing the central or most promising roles here?

if I sort of sum up the whole bill in one nutshell or one tweet, it’s that we’re going to tax billionaire corporations and tax cheats, and use that money to make energy cheaper and cleaner for all Americans, and also to build more of those technologies here in the United States, which we can talk about later

There’s loan programs that can help offer lower cost financing for projects. There’s grants that go out to states, and rural utilities, and others to help install things. And all of that is designed to make the cleaner option the good business decision, the good household financial decision.

the excellent article in “Nature Climate Change” from 2018, called “Sequencing to Ratchet Up Climate Policy Stringency,” which is the lea

So why electricity? Why has electrifying everything become almost synonymous with decarbonization in climate world?

So that it just makes good economic sense. And that clean energy is cheap energy for everybody. That’s with subsidies upfront, but it’s also going to kick off the same kind of innovation and incremental learning by doing in economies of scale that unlock those tremendous cost reductions for solar, and wind, and lithium ion batteries over the last decade

so we have to guide that process in a way that doesn’t recreate some of the harms of the last era of nation building, where we drove interstates right through the middle of Black and brown communities, and they had no say in the process. So that’s the challenge at a high level is like how do you build a national social license and sense of mission or purpose, and how do you guide the deployment of that infrastructure at scale, which doesn’t concentrate harms and spreads benefits amongst the people who really should be benefiting.

By no means is that impossible, but it is a profound construction challenge

author is —

And so we’re going to kick off the same kind of processes as well with this bill, building on the demonstration and hubs funding and things like that in the infrastructure law for the next generation of technologies that can take us even further down the path to net zero beyond 2030.

electricity is a way to power our lives — heat homes, power factories, move cars around — that at least when we use the electricity on that end, doesn’t lead to any CO2, or frankly, any other air pollutants and other combustion-related pollutants that cause public health impacts.

We made it 10 times easier to take action. So for a given amount of political will, we can do 10 times more decarbonization in the power sector and in transportation, which are two most heavily emitting sectors than we could do a decade ag

The reason that these aren’t expensive alternative energy technologies, as we called them in the 2009 era, and are now mainstream affordable options is because we used public policy.

he author is Michael Pahle and a variety of others who said — both economists, political scientists and policy analysts, who again, are trying to face down this reality that current policy ambition is inadequate. We’ve got to go further and faster. And so they’re trying to think about how do you order these policie

But your product is incredible. But the gasoline, Elon, is the the cost of energy, not only gasoline. It’s the cost of heating your house and cooling your house. That has to come down. It’s gone up 100 percent, 150 and 200 percent. And that has to come down when that comes down. And we’re going to drill baby drill. You know, they stopped drilling and then they went back to drilling because they went back to the Trump policy.

DONALD TRUMP: But if they won the day after they get into office, we’re going to — this country will go out of business because they’re going to go to an energy policy that’s not sustainable. Wind and different things. You’re not going to have any. And I know you’re a big fan of the A.I.

And I have to say that A.I. and this is shocking to me, but A.I. requires twice the energy that the country already produces for everything. So what you’re going to have to build, we’re going to have to build a lot of energy if our country will be competitive with China, because that’s our primary competitor for this on the A.I.

DONALD TRUMP: Now, your cars don’t require too much gasoline. So, you know, you’re you have a good and you do make a great product. I have to say I have to be honest with you. That doesn’t mean everybody should have an electric car, but these are minor details.

we were sitting on the biggest pile of liquid gold anywhere in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than Russia. And we were going to drill and we were going to make so much money. We were going to supply Europe with oil. I had stopped the Russian pipeline and we were going to supply them with oil and gas.

ELON MUSK: I want to say something about, like, you know, maybe my views on climate change and oil and gas, because I think it’s probably different from what most people would assume, because my views are actually pretty, I think, moderate in this regard, which is that I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry and the people that have worked very hard in those industries to provide the necessary energy to support the economy. And if we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse.

So it’s you know, I don’t think it’s right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry. And the world has a certain demand for oil and gas, and it’s probably better if the United States provides that than some other countries. And it would help with prosperity in the US. And at the same time, obviously, my view is, is like, we do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy, because eventually you do run out of I mean, you run out of oil and gas.

ELON MUSK: It’s not there. It’s not infinite. And there is some risk. I think it’s not the risk is not as as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming.

But I think if you just keep increasing the cost of a million in the atmosphere long enough, eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe, people don’t realize this. If you go, if you go past 1000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range, we’re adding, I think, about roughly two parts per million per year. So I mean, still gives us what it means, like, we still have quite a bit of time.

But so there’s not like we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or right basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.

DONALD TRUMP: How crazy is that? Where I mean, you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle and the whole, the whole world.

DONALD TRUMP: But it’s largely taken its lead from us. I do say, though, I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants. And, you know, so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment. I mean, someday you might be able to.

But I do hear we have anywhere from 100 to 500 years left. You know, much of it hasn’t even been found yet.

ELON MUSK: Yeah.

So I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows. But during that time, something will come around that will be very good.

ELON MUSK: And you know, that’s what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress and progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, we like we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re, you know, sexy.

But I mean, my view is like if you just look at sort of the past million that increments every year, you know, you get sort of two or three past million every year of CO2. I mean, I think some of that it’s problematic if it accelerates, if you start going from two or three to, say, five. And then there may be some situations where you get a step change increase in the CO2. And I think we don’t — we don’t want to get too close to a thousand PPM because like that’s that’s actually makes it uncomfortable to agree, like just existing in a thousand PPM CO2 is on top of that’s like a that’s considered like an industrial hazard.

So so, you know, that’s you start getting headaches and stuff. So even without global warming, it’s not comfortable. So you don’t want to get too close to that.

ELON MUSK: But I mean, I think we’ve got I think we want to just move over and like and if if I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re I don’t know, mostly sustainable. I think that’ll probably be OK. So it’s not like the house is on fire immediately, but I think it is something we need to to move towards and on, you know, on balance, it’s probably better to move there faster than slower.

But like I said, without vilifying the oil and gas industry and without causing hardship in the short term, I think this can be done without, you know, people can still have, you know, a stake and they can still drive gasoline cars and, you know, it’s OK.

It’s like it’s not — I don’t think we should vilify people for it, but I think we should just just generally lean in the direction of sustainability. And I actually think solar is going to be a majority of of us energy generation in the future and certainly trending that way. And so you get the solar power, mind that with with with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn’t shine at night and and they use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long term sustainable solution.

ELON MUSK: Well, I mean, my estimate would be, you know, a little more aggressive than that. But it’s not the sort of like we’re all going to die in five years stuff that that’s obviously BS.

I mean, they’re cool. I mean, the sexy joke Model S, Model 3, Model X and Y spells out sexy is probably most expensive joke out there. But, you know, I just I don’t know, I like cheesy humor, you know, so and but I’m I’m a big fan of like, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s let’s work towards, you know, a better future and would do so without demonizing. Right.

DONALD TRUMP: I’m OK. You know, it’s very interesting. You use the word global warming and today they use the word climate change because, you know, you have some places that go up and so they were getting themselves in a little trouble with the word global warming because not every place is warming. Some places are going the opposite direction.

DONALD TRUMP: But I would think and I have no idea because that’s not my world. But I would think that this would be something that would be interesting. But, you know, the one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming. And for me, that’s an immediate problem because you have, as I said, five countries where you have major nuclear and, you know, probably some others are getting there and that’s very dangerous.

That’s where you need a strong American president because you just you don’t want to have this proliferation. But you have five countries and getting where, you know, China is much less than us right now, but they’re going to catch us sooner than people think. They’re way lower. Russia and us are number one and we’re sort of tied.

And China is far behind, but they’re developing at a level that, you know, you’re not surprised to hear very fast. It’s going to they’ll end up catching up, maybe even surpassing. But to me, the biggest problem is not climate change. It’s not and everything’s a problem.

ELON MUSK: Yeah, actually, there’s a bad side of nuclear, which is a nuclear war, very bad side. But there’s there’s also, I think, nuclear electricity, absolutely underrated. And it’s actually, you know, people have this fear of nuclear, nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of electricity generation.

It’s just a huge misunderstanding. And if you look at the injuries and deaths, you know, caused by, say, I mean, I’m not going to pick on coal mining, but just any kind of mining operation. And there’s a certain number of injuries and deaths per year, and you compare that to nuclear. Nuclear is actually way better.

ELON MUSK: So it’s underrated as an electricity source. And I think it’s something that’s worth reconsidering. But there’s so much regulation that people can’t get it done. So that, you know, —

DONALD TRUMP: Maybe they’ll have to change the name — the name is the rough name. There are some areas like that, like when you see what happened in Japan, the brand that we have to give it a good name, we’ll name it after you or something, you know. No, it has a branding problem.

DONALD TRUMP: You know, you realize it’s pretty bad,ELON MUSK: But it’s actually not that bad. So like after Fukushima happened in Japan, like people were asking me in California, you know, are we worried about like a nucleic cloud coming from Japan? I’m like, no, that’s crazy. It’s actually it’s not even dangerous in Fukushima. I actually flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. And I donated a solar water treatment, solar powered system for a water treatment plant.

ELON MUSK: It’s like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re like full cities again. So it’s really not something that, you know, it’s not as scary as people think, basically. But let’s see.

We are also producing ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction, from thermonuclear bombs to doomsday viruses. Our leaders don’t lack information about these dangers, yet instead of collaborating to find solutions, they are edging closer to a global war.

Despite – or perhaps because of – our hoard of data, we are continuing to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, pollute rivers and oceans, cut down forests, destroy entire habitats, drive countless species to extinction, and jeopardise the ecological foundations of our own species

For most of our networks have been built and maintained by spreading fictions, fantasies and mass delusions – ranging from enchanted broomsticks to financial systems. Our problem, then, is a network problem. Specifically, it is an information problem. For information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are.

Traditionally, the term “AI” has been used as an acronym for artificial intelligence. But it is perhaps better to think of it as an acronym for alien intelligence

AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands

Nuclear bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill, nor can they improve themselves or invent even more powerful bombs. In contrast, autonomous drones can decide by themselves who to kill, and AIs can create novel bomb designs, unprecedented military strategies and better AIs.

AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent. The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us, and that we don’t fully understand or control.

repreneurs such as Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mustafa Suleyman have warned that AI could destroy our civilisation. In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, more than a third gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction.

As AI evolves, it becomes less artificial (in the sense of depending on human designs) and more alien

AI isn’t progressing towards human-level intelligence. It is evolving an alien type of intelligence.

generative AIs like GPT-4 already create new poems, stories and images. This trend will only increase and accelerate, making it more difficult to understand our own lives. Can we trust computer algorithms to make wise decisions and create a better world? That’s a much bigger gamble than trusting an enchanted broom to fetch water

it is more than just human lives we are gambling on. AI is already capable of producing art and making scientific discoveries by itself. In the next few decades, it will be likely to gain the ability even to create new life forms, either by writing genetic code or by inventing an inorganic code animating inorganic entities. AI could therefore alter the course not just of our species’ history but of the evolution of all life forms.

“Then … came move number 37,” writes Suleyman. “It made no sense. AlphaGo had apparently blown it, blindly following an apparently losing strategy no professional player would ever pursue. The live match commentators, both professionals of the highest ranking, said it was a ‘very strange move’ and thought it was ‘a mistake’.

as the endgame approached, that ‘mistaken’ move proved pivotal. AlphaGo won again. Go strategy was being rewritten before our eyes. Our AI had uncovered ideas that hadn’t occurred to the most brilliant players in thousands of years.”

“In AI, the neural networks moving toward autonomy are, at present, not explainable. You can’t walk someone through the decision-making process to explain precisely why an algorithm produced a specific prediction. Engineers can’t peer beneath the hood and easily explain in granular detail what caused something to happen. GPT‑4, AlphaGo and the rest are black boxes, their outputs and decisions based on opaque and impossibly intricate chains of minute signals.”

Yet during all those millennia, human minds have explored only certain areas in the landscape of Go. Other areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there. AI, being free from the limitations of human minds, discovered and explored these previously hidden areas.

Second, move 37 demonstrated the unfathomability of AI. Even after AlphaGo played it to achieve victory, Suleyman and his team couldn’t explain how AlphaGo decided to play it.

Move 37 is an emblem of the AI revolution for two reasons. First, it demonstrated the alien nature of AI. In east Asia, Go is considered much more than a game: it is a treasured cultural tradition. For more than 2,500 years, tens of millions of people have played Go, and entire schools of thought have developed around the game, espousing different strategies and philosophies

The rise of unfathomable alien intelligence poses a threat to all humans, and poses a particular threat to democracy. If more and more decisions about people’s lives are made in a black box, so voters cannot understand and challenge them, democracy ceases to functio

Human voters may keep choosing a human president, but wouldn’t this be just an empty ceremony? Even today, only a small fraction of humanity truly understands the financial system

As the 2007‑8 financial crisis indicated, some complex financial devices and principles were intelligible to only a few financial wizards. What happens to democracy when AIs create even more complex financial devices and when the number of humans who understand the financial system drops to zero?

Translating Goethe’s cautionary fable into the language of modern finance, imagine the following scenario: a Wall Street apprentice fed up with the drudgery of the financial workshop creates an AI called Broomstick, provides it with a million dollars in seed money, and orders it to make more money.

n pursuit of more dollars, Broomstick not only devises new investment strategies, but comes up with entirely new financial devices that no human being has ever thought about.

many financial areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there. Broomstick, being free from the limitations of human minds, discovers and explores these previously hidden areas, making financial moves that are the equivalent of AlphaGo’s move 37.

For a couple of years, as Broomstick leads humanity into financial virgin territory, everything looks wonderful. The markets are soaring, the money is flooding in effortlessly, and everyone is happy. Then comes a crash bigger even than 1929 or 2008. But no human being – either president, banker or citizen – knows what caused it and what could be done about it

AI, too, is a global problem. Accordingly, to understand the new computer politics, it is not enough to examine how discrete societies might react to AI. We also need to consider how AI might change relations between societies on a global level.

As long as humanity stands united, we can build institutions that will regulate AI, whether in the field of finance or war. Unfortunately, humanity has never been united. We have always been plagued by bad actors, as well as by disagreements between good actors. The rise of AI poses an existential danger to humankind, not because of the malevolence of computers, but because of our own shortcomings.

errorists might use AI to instigate a global pandemic. The terrorists themselves may have little knowledge of epidemiology, but the AI could synthesise for them a new pathogen, order it from commercial laboratories or print it in biological 3D printers, and devise the best strategy to spread it around the world, via airports or food supply chain

desperate governments request help from the only entity capable of understanding what is happening – Broomstick. The AI makes several policy recommendations, far more audacious than quantitative easing – and far more opaque, too. Broomstick promises that these policies will save the day, but human politicians – unable to understand the logic behind Broomstick’s recommendations – fear they might completely unravel the financial and even social fabric of the world. Should they listen to the AI?

Human civilisation could also be devastated by weapons of social mass destruction, such as stories that undermine our social bonds. An AI developed in one country could be used to unleash a deluge of fake news, fake money and fake humans so that people in numerous other countries lose the ability to trust anything or anyone.

Many societies – both democracies and dictatorships – may act responsibly to regulate such usages of AI, clamp down on bad actors and restrain the dangerous ambitions of their own rulers and fanatics. But if even a handful of societies fail to do so, this could be enough to endanger the whole of humankind

Thus, a paranoid dictator might hand unlimited power to a fallible AI, including even the power to launch nuclear strikes. If the AI then makes an error, or begins to pursue an unexpected goal, the result could be catastrophic, and not just for that country

magine a situation – in 20 years, say – when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony?

What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control?

In the economic realm, previous empires were based on material resources such as land, cotton and oil. This placed a limit on the empire’s ability to concentrate both economic wealth and political power in one place. Physics and geology don’t allow all the world’s land, cotton or oil to be moved to one country

t is different with the new information empires. Data can move at the speed of light, and algorithms don’t take up much space. Consequently, the world’s algorithmic power can be concentrated in a single hub. Engineers in a single country might write the code and control the keys for all the crucial algorithms that run the entire world.

AI and automation therefore pose a particular challenge to poorer developing countries. In an AI-driven global economy, the digital leaders claim the bulk of the gains and could use their wealth to retrain their workforce and profit even more

Meanwhile, the value of unskilled labourers in left-behind countries will decline, causing them to fall even further behind. The result might be lots of new jobs and immense wealth in San Francisco and Shanghai, while many other parts of the world face economic ruin.

AI is expected to add $15.7tn (£12.3tn) to the global economy by 2030. But if current trends continue, it is projected that China and North America – the two leading AI superpowers – will together take home 70% of that money.

uring the cold war, the iron curtain was in many places literally made of metal: barbed wire separated one country from another. Now the world is increasingly divided by the silicon curtain. The code on your smartphone determines on which side of the silicon curtain you live, which algorithms run your life, who controls your attention and where your data flows.

Cyberweapons can bring down a country’s electric grid, but they can also be used to destroy a secret research facility, jam an enemy sensor, inflame a political scandal, manipulate elections or hack a single smartphone. And they can do all that stealthily. They don’t announce their presence with a mushroom cloud and a storm of fire, nor do they leave a visible trail from launchpad to target

The two digital spheres may therefore drift further and further apart. For centuries, new information technologies fuelled the process of globalisation and brought people all over the world into closer contact. Paradoxically, information technology today is so powerful it can potentially split humanity by enclosing different people in separate information cocoons, ending the idea of a single shared human reality

For decades, the world’s master metaphor was the web. The master metaphor of the coming decades might be the cocoon.

Other countries or blocs, such as the EU, India, Brazil and Russia, may try to create their own digital cocoons,

Instead of being divided between two global empires, the world might be divided among a dozen empires.

The more the new empires compete against one another, the greater the danger of armed conflict.

The cold war between the US and the USSR never escalated into a direct military confrontation, largely thanks to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But the danger of escalation in the age of AI is bigger, because cyber warfare is inherently different from nuclear warfare.

US companies are now forbidden to export such chips to China. While in the short term this hampers China in the AI race, in the long term it pushes China to develop a completely separate digital sphere that will be distinct from the American digital sphere even in its smallest buildings.

The temptation to start a limited cyberwar is therefore big, and so is the temptation to escalate it.

A second crucial difference concerns predictability. The cold war was like a hyper-rational chess game, and the certainty of destruction in the event of nuclear conflict was so great that the desire to start a war was correspondingly small

Cyberwarfare lacks this certainty. Nobody knows for sure where each side has planted its logic bombs, Trojan horses and malware. Nobody can be certain whether their own weapons would actually work when called upon

Such uncertainty undermines the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. One side might convince itself – rightly or wrongly – that it can launch a successful first strike and avoid massive retaliation

Even if humanity avoids the worst-case scenario of global war, the rise of new digital empires could still endanger the freedom and prosperity of billions of people. The industrial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries exploited and repressed their colonies, and it would be foolhardy to expect new digital empires to behave much better

Moreover, if the world is divided into rival empires, humanity is unlikely to cooperate to overcome the ecological crisis or to regulate AI and other disruptive technologies such as bioengineering.

The division of the world into rival digital empires dovetails with the political vision of many leaders who believe that the world is a jungle, that the relative peace of recent decades has been an illusion, and that the only real choice is whether to play the part of predator or prey.

Given such a choice, most leaders would prefer to go down in history as predators and add their names to the grim list of conquerors that unfortunate pupils are condemned to memorise for their history exams.

These leaders should be reminded, however, that there is a new alpha predator in the jungle. If humanity doesn’t find a way to cooperate and protect our shared interests, we will all be easy prey to AI.

Musk and other right-wingers who bemoan a coming “population collapse” tend to oppose foreign immigration. Musk—once an immigrant himself, and possibly an illegal one, for a time—consistently emphasizes the ways in which immigrants weaken or threaten American society. He’s even trafficked in conspiracy theories, such as the story that President Joe Biden was secretly flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country. Musk has publicly affirmed his belief in core aspects of Great Replacement Theory.

These positions have led Musk into obvious contradictions. Despite claiming the world is “basically empty of humans,” Musk has also posted, “America will fail if it tries to absorb the world.” Why would America “fail” if there’s nothing to absorb?

Instead, the new pronatalism of the hard right is exclusionary and authoritarian. Instead of being portrayed as equal partners with men in building stable families, women in this paradigm are understood as either mere tools for reproduction or targets of sexual violence who require men’s protection. Family is not a good in itself, in this picture: It receives its value instrumentally, as a method of achieving the deeper goals that underlie right-wing cultural politics.

All this makes clear that Musk’s interest in raising birth rates is about producing not more people per se but more of what he considers the right sort of people. It’s why he claims that “the culture of Italy, Japan, and France will disappear” if the women of those countries don’t have more babies. In today’s right-wing pronatalist picture, children, like women, are demographic tools.

Musk has become a leading voice of right-wing pronatalism in the United States. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the oddball couple described by the Guardian as “America’s premier pronatalists,” celebrate Musk as one of their most important allies in spreading their vision for a genetically selective, IQ-focused, eugenics-adjacent pronatalism. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support. Our politics are very aligned,” Malcolm told a profiler just after interrupting himself to smack one of his children in the face.

The demographic anxieties that give rise to these sorts of concerns also shape right-wing pronatalist views of white women. On Wednesday, Dave Rubin implored Taylor Swift to rethink her endorsement of Harris, invoking the threat of sexual violence from immigrant men: “You are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain’t pretty!”

Attractive, white American women are not fellow subjects or citizens so much as sexual prizes that must be protected from the threat of violence by foreign men. Men like Musk might offer, seriously or not, to give them a child. Rubin might act as if he’s protecting them from sexual savages. The common thread is that the role of women in all of this is to be beautiful, to produce children, and to remain unsullied by foreigners. There’s nothing pro-family about any of that.

Nobody ever asks if maybe school can’t do the things we’re demanding it do. I’m not asking for a sympathetic hearing for those ideas; I’m asking for any hearing of those ideas. But the New York Times isn’t going to run any pieces about eduskepticism, even though that domain desperately needs new ideas and radical rethinking.

The trouble remains, though - and this is the hell I live in - that it’s still really hard to spark big conversations across the discourse from a newsletter.

I can’t force a topic into people’s brains. That is a privilege that traditional media still hoards.

I can tell you that, in general, when a high-falutin publication throws out an automated form as their submission system, it’s a way to tell prospective freelancers to fuck off. Which is still, somehow, less insulting than what’s going on at Harper’s these days, where the directive is to send your submissions in a paper letter. In 2024. It’s not just that this is obviously far more tedious for the writer, it can only be more work for the editors and the publication as well. But apparently the need to signal that they don’t want submissions, while maintaining the pretense of not being entirely closed off to the rest of us, is sufficient that they’ll pretend that email does not exist. New York’s contact page, which once had submission instructions, no longer does. (But if you want to “pitch a store opening,” you’re in luck.) Never fear, though - they too have somewhere you can send a physical letter.

I had a pitch for Harper’s, a good one. They have an attractive magazine-out-of-time quality, a remove from the hustle that I quite like. It happens that they published maybe my favorite piece among all I’ve ever published. But I couldn’t figure out how to pitch without buying a printer, and anyway I’m confident that sending the physical letter to the listed address would have had precisely the same effect as leaving it at Lewis Lapham’s grave. So I gave up. When someone says “fuck off” as clearly they’re saying it, it’s best to take them seriously.

What is the advantage? It’s like an NFL coach with a shitty team telling the beat reporters he thinks the solutions are already on the roster, I can’t decide if they really believe it or not. Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that all the money flowing into the hands of grubby little outsiders like me is a symbol of a broad discontent within the audience? Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that if nothing else this is useful market information, all of this steady drip drip drip of Lorenzians and Yglesiaii and Nates Silver, Bronze, and Gold? Tina Brown! When Tina Brown feels comfortable sitting at the freakazoid table at the high school cafeteria, perhaps it’s time to ask if maybe there’s some reason why, that maybe the business has grown myopic and scared, that it’s responded to financial difficulties by crawling into a defensive crouch. At exactly the time when the public’s appetite for outsider voices has been proven, quantitatively and with dollars attached, the usual suspects have built the walls higher around their pages, making freelance contribution even harder. Why? For who?

Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.

Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C.,

“Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under the first Trump administration. She wrote a section on the E.P.A. for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for re-engineering the federal government. In it, she recommends slashing the E.P.A.’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water.

He was a member of the House’s Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and earned a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. It is a low mark from the environmental advocacy group, but it was nevertheless higher than nearly any other Republican.

When Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized Mr. Zeldin for opposing the climate law, he responded on social media, saying “I just voted NO because the bill sucks.”

“Being that it raises taxes, adds 87,000 new IRS agents, & spends hundreds of billions of dollars our country doesn’t have on far-left policies our country can’t afford, I’m not surprised you’d blindly endorse it,” he wrote.

During Mr. Zeldin’s tenure in the House, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.

Mr. Zeldin has also taken some votes that the group supported, including prohibiting oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He also voted in favor of a landmark conservation bill that passed with bipartisan support and was signed by Mr. Trump. It guarantees maximum annual funding for a federal program to acquire and preserve land for public use.

He voted for a bill that would require the E.P.A. to set limits on PFAS, which are a family of man-made chemicals that are persistent in the environment and the human body. The E.P.A. under the Biden administration has set strict limits on the chemicals in drinking water. In 2020, he voted against legislation that would have slashed E.P.A.’s budget.

“It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hold these beliefs and never buy fast fashion or a piece of plastic. I hold these beliefs whilst sometimes buying new clothes or out-of-season strawberries in a plastic container. It’s the justification I have a problem with. 

Because I see these arguments constantly. Why should *I* have to do XYZ if a large corporation is doing ABC? Why can’t *I* go on holiday when an insert celebrity is flying their private jet 10x a week? Why should *I* care about this thing when no one cares about this other thing?! 

I’ve become a staunch believer there are few excuses when it comes to actions which directly harm our planet. 

We live in a society where unless you’re very wealthy and VERY time-rich you cannot exist without impacting the planet. Let’s not kid ourselves into believing there is any other reason we live in this way. 

the real question we should be posing is what does giving this stuff up open up for us? How does living in this different way enrich and improve our lives and our wider community’s lives? 

You don’t overconsume because your life is hard and big corporations exist, you overconsume because you live in a society built in a way to funnel you into doing exactly that.1

I wrote ‘the narrative younger people are fed’ because whilst these things are true, I often feel they’re used as a way to keep us down, to keep us depressed and complacent so we don’t rebel.

I think these students believe these narratives to be true, doing so keeps them safe in their current way of living, and allows them to get through the day without as much mental turmoil. 

I’ve been there. I tried to do it all. I tried to be zero-waste-thrift-store-girly, but it drove me crazy. One person can’t live in a completely ‘sustainable’ way, without ever leaving a footprint on this planet, it’s impossible and will only leave you feeling extremely exhausted and extremely guilty. 

The truth is sometimes I buy new socks and plastic contact lenses. Sometimes I want to buy a nice bag and a new pair of shoes and fit in with the wider society and others in my age group. Yes, it plays directly into capitalism’s hands, yes, I am doing what the man wants me to do, I still feel guilty, and I still question all my life choices, but god damn, you gotta live. 

can you blame ‘em? With the narrative younger people are fed these days: you’ll never own a house; the job market is atrocious; good luck building any kind of safety net; another oil and gas line has been approved; one war is brewing and one has broken out; oh look! another recession.

Rather than saying we have to give things up to Save The Earth!, that we have to stop consuming to Live Sustainably!, we need to tell people why living in this alternative way is so rich, so nourishing, so plentiful, so beautiful. 

I’ve quoted before and will quote again from Donella Meadows: “People don’t need enormous cars; they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes; they need to feel attractive and they need excitement, variety and beauty. [...] People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, joy. To try and fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth.”2

Our climate conversations–our climate education–cannot just focus on what we need to give up, instead it must focus on what we get to build and welcome into our lives when we’re not wasting our money, time, and energy on buying or not buying new clothes or plastic-wrapped food.

The majority of my friends growing up did not have hobbies, we found joy and community and connection in consumption. Yes, consuming less is an essential piece of the climate puzzle, but telling people they can no longer consume will not get us there, it will only be taking away many people’s only sense of joy and satisfaction in life.