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

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

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

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

david wallace-wells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”

t then calculates how much the average citizen on Earth can emit over their lifetime to keep temperature rises below 1.5C or 2C above pre-industrial levels, the goal of the world’s nations to avoid climate catastrophe.

The children and young people taking part in the youth strikes (born 1997-2012) will have carbon budgets just one sixth those of their baby boomer grandparents (1946-1964).

He said it is the first systematic use of emissions data to inform the debate about intergenerational responsibility for climate change and had produced some “uncomfortable numbers”.

There is a currently a wide gap between the average annual emissions of a US citizen (16.9 tonnes) and an Indian citizen (1.9 tonnes)

in a second analysis, Carbon Brief posited a future carbon budget that would be the same for every citizen on the planet. This would mean that the budget for a child born today in the US is even lower, 97% lower than that of that of their grandparents. For someone born today in Europe, their budget would be 94% lower

it turns out that the way we move largely determines the way we live.

gadgets cumulatively contribute only a fraction of what we save by living in a walkable neighborhood. It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.

“gizmo green”; the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.

study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts more than walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.

because it’s better than nothing, LEED — like the Prius — is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”

10 to 20 units per acre is the density at which drivable suburbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.

“We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to

The average New Yorker consumes roughly one-third the electricity of the average Dallas resident, and ultimately generates less than one-third the greenhouse gases of the average American.

the American anti-urban ethos remained intact as everything else changed. The desire to be isolated in nature, adopted en masse, led to the quantities and qualities we now call “sprawl,” which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.

New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half, as does Sydney — and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half, and you end up with Hong Kong

Paris is one place that has determined that its future depends on reducing its auto dependence. The city has recently decided to create 25 miles of dedicated busways, introduced 20,000 shared city bikes in 1,450 locations, and committed to removing 55,000 parking spaces from the city every year for the next 20 years. These changes sound pretty radical, but they are supported by 80 percent of the population.

increasing density from two units per acre to 20 units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from 20 to 200.

New York is our densest big city and, not coincidentally, the one with the best transit service. All the other subway stations in America put together would not outnumber the 468 stops of the MTA. In terms of resource efficiency, it’s the best we’ve got.

most communities with these densities are also organized as traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, the sort of accommodating environment that entices people out of their cars. Everything above that is icing on the cake.

unless we hit a national crisis of unprecedented severity, it is hard to imagine any argument framed in the language of sustainability causing many people to modify their behavior. So what will?

The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the 10 categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.

the top 10 cities always seem to include a bunch of places where they speak German (Vienna, Zurich, Dusseldorf, etc.), along with Vancouver, Auckland, and Sydney. These are all places with compact settlement patterns, good transit, and principally walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, there isn’t a single auto-oriented city in the top 50. The highest-rated American cities in 2010, which don’t appear until No. 31, are Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, and Seattle.

Our cities, which are twice as efficient as our suburbs, burn twice the fuel of these European, Canadian, and Aussie/Kiwi places. Yet the quality of life in these foreign cities is deemed higher than ours by a long shot.

if we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been done,

Now that over 18.5m bitcoin have been mined, the average computer can no longer mine bitcoins. Instead, mining now requires special computer equipment that can handle the intense processing power needed to get bitcoin today. And, of course, these special computers need a lot of electricity to run.

A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site.

“Computers and smartphones have much larger carbon footprints than typewriters and telegraphs. Sometimes a technology is so revolutionary and important for humanity that society accepts the tradeoffs,” wrote investor Tyler Winklevoss on Twitter.

Vitalik Buterin, the computer scientist who invited ethereum, told IEEE Spectrum that mining cryptocurrency can be “a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue”, Buterin said. “There are real consumers – real people – whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff.”

Before some basic tools were found here in 2010, it had been believed that humans had entered Britain much later, about 700,000 years ago, Dr. Ashton said. (Before 2005, when another set of tools was discovered in Suffolk, the presumed date was 500,000 years ago.)

“We can reconstruct the climate and climate change nearly one million years ago,” Dr. Ashton said. “The big lesson is, we have to adapt. Whether we like it or not, the climate will change — it always has — and today we are accelerating that change.”

Standing on the ridge above Cardigan Bay in Borth, Dr. Bates described what the area would have looked like at the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago: more than half a mile of ice overhead and dry land stretching across today’s North Sea. The sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.“You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,”

About 10,000 years ago, temperatures warmed sharply, by eight to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. By that time, the European ice sheets had melted, but the much thicker North American sheets took much longer. While the climate had warmed to today’s levels, allowing mixed oak woodland to grow and humans to recolonize Britain, the sea level remained some 130 feet lower for another 3,000 years.

When it did rise, it would have been traumatic for the population, wiping out whatever settlement there was,

“Even in the reduced life span of the day, the coastline would have advanced dramatically,”

The ultimate legend, of course, is Atlantis, which Plato placed somewhere in the North Atlantic.

“It was a traumatic geological event, and people turned it into a story to make sense of it,”

Socially, the booming fast fashion industry is often built on low wages paid to women working in factories abroad but also increasingly in the UK

In the UK, we buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe – five times what we bought in the 1980s, which creates 1.3m tonnes of waste each year, some 350,000 tonnes of which is dumped in landfill or incinerated.

Yet despite the overwhelming evidence gathered by the environmental audit committee (EAC), ministers this week rejected every recommendation for tackling abuses across the fashion industry, including a ban on incinerating or landfilling stock that can be recycled and a 1p charge on each garment to raise £35m a year for better clothing collection and sorting, a move supported by many in the industry.

But the response of the government was met with anger by many within the industry, where ethical fashion firms come up against others who produce at lower costs on the back of exploitative wage structures and environmentally damaging production models

“It is a vastly damaging industry that has been spiralling unchecked for far too long. The Earth and the people on it are exploited and damaged at every single step of the chain, and this culminates with unimaginable mountains of unused excess stock or badly made broken waste clothing with nowhere to go other than landfill or incineration.”

But others are less sure that voluntary measures will tackle what they say is a systemic power imbalance between brands and manufacturers, which leads to worker exploitation, or address the enormous environmental footprint of their trade.

“The fundamental problem with much of fast fashion is that its social and environmental costs are not taken into account. The environmental costs of materials and fabric are mostly offshored. The production that takes place in the UK often only pays half the legal minimum wage.

“So who is accountable for water and chemical pollution abroad, precarious work and employment, the undercutting of compliant manufacturers, the pollution from delivery and lack of recycling at home? Brands might find it difficult to make £5 fast fashion dresses and be socially and environmentally sustainable.

Ways to take the environmental heat out of your fashion habit

Commit to wearing every piece 30 times. If we doubled the amount of time we kept clothes for, we would cut our fashion emissions by 44%.

Get smart about fibres. Cheap cotton and synthetics come with huge environmental footprints. Cotton uses unsustainable amounts of water and pesticide. Go for hemp blended with organic cotton and silk and lyocel/modal.

Treat cotton as a luxury fibre. Buy products certified as organic to be free of the pesticide burden and plan to keep them for years.

Wash clothes less often. The average laundry cycle releases hundreds of thousands of tiny fragments of plastic from synthetic fibres into waterways. Put jeans in the freezer and remove dirt when frozen. Fleeces have been shown to release the most plastic fibres

Delete shopping apps from your phone and swear off insta-shopping for fashion. Go shopping for clothes in a shop.

f dry cleaning is a must, use an eco-friendly process: conventional dry cleaning harms the soil, air and wate

Oxfam estimates that the number of billionaires on the Forbes list with business interests in the fossil fuel sector rose from 54 in 2010 to 88 in 2015, and the size of their fortunes expanded from over $200 billion to more than $300 billion.

with divestment, a little can go a long way. "We did some simulations that shows that with the divestment movement you don't need everyone to divest," said Otto. "If the minority of investors divest, the other investors will not invest in those fossil fuel assets because they will be afraid of losing money ... even if they have no environmental concerns."

Otto argued that rich people could use their political power to instigate positive changes to climate policy.

The wealthy can also support climate research. In 2015, Microsoft founder Bill Gates committed $2 billion of his fortune to fund research and development into clean energy.

The super-rich might also have an influence on other people's carbon emissions.

Shell has a three-year target beginning in 2019 to reduce its carbon footprint by 2-3%, while ExxonMobil has invested $9 billion over almost two decades in lower-emission energy solution

"The first immediate task for all parts of the industry is reducing the carbon footprint of their own operations," said Birol.

"As of today, around 15% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions come from the process of getting oil and gas out of the ground and to consumers. A large part of these emissions can be brought down relatively quickly and easily," he said.

The cost of developing these technologies represent an investment in companies' ability to prosper in the long term, the report said.

The seven largest oil and gas companies account for just 12% of oil and gas reserves, 15% of production and 10% of emissions from industry operations, according to the report.

The International Energy Agency's report will be presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday.

Allbirds is also largely known for everyday, "athleisure" sneakers, rather than performance sports shoes. The new partnership will combine its background in sustainability with Adidas' expertise in performance footwear.

Making a standard sneaker creates, on average, about 12.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, a common measurement for carbon footprint. Allbirds' products average 7.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, according to the company's website.

Adidas and Allbirds are aiming for between 2 and 3 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in the first version of their shoe collaboration, with later iterations moving toward zero emissions, Adidas' Carnes said.

The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption

But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.

Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown.

Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.

At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”

If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.

he proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.

how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.

Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.

Malthusianism slides easily into racism.

Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”

These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.

The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK

Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.

So a good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty.

Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind

Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?

Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.

The economy that Hickel envisions would cease to pursue growth, green or otherwise. Materials and energy will still be consumed, and waste generated, but at much lower levels. All impacts on the natural world will be tethered to the question, “Growth for whom, and to what ends?” In place of an individualistic consumer economy, Hickel’s post-growth economy would direct itself toward the creation of public goods that allow the many to live well—mass transit, health care—rather than to keep a few in luxury.

A growing body of research reveals an inverse relationship between “happiness” and growth beyond a certain point.

In the rich countries, general contentment peaked in 1950, when GDP and real per capita incomes were fractions of their present size (and inequality near modern historic lows); degrowthers posit that similar happiness levels will be reclaimed on the way back down the economic mountain

Hickel describes a post-growth economy defined by stability and equality, and the freedom and leisure possible when the economy is no longer subservient to the god of growth

He estimates that the U.S. economy could be scaled down by as much as 65 percent while still improving the lives of its citizens. This includes the metric most often tied to celebrations of endless growth: life expectancy.

degrowth will entail a steep reduction across a much wider range of high-energy consumer goods. Keeping a global economy within safe ecological limits is a zero-sum game.

When limited resources are directed toward clean energy infrastructure, public health care, and regenerative agriculture, it will still be possible to build and power modern 24-hour hospitals in every city, but not to have Xbox consoles, two-car garages, and giant appliances in every home.

would have to redefine it, too.

The post-growth economy could not succeed solely by redistributing wealth; it would have to redefine it, too.

He argues that short-term growth would have to continue in those countries that have still not achieved the basic levels of sanitation, infrastructure, and education needed for a decent standard of living, to close the gap. Their larger goal, meanwhile, would be to break free from their historical role as a source of natural resources and cheap labor for the north.

For degrowth to be just, global, and effective, the sharpest reduction in consumption will have to come from the north, where the greatest damage to the planet is currently being done

Ecological economists generally agree that the safe outer limit is eight tons

One person in a low-income country has a materials footprint of roughly two tons per year, a measure of total raw materials consumed, including those embodied in imports. In lower-middle–income countries, that number is four tons; in upper-middle–income countries, 12 tons. In the high-income nations of North America, Europe, and Asia, the number leaps to 28

The wealthiest 20 percent of the human population is responsible for 90 percent of “overshoot” carbon in the atmosphere (that is, a level of carbon that exceeds the limit needed to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius)

The planet’s richest one percent has a carbon footprint twice the size of the poorest half of the world’s population combined

For the global north, degrowth not only starts at home, it starts with the biggest houses.

Less Is More doesn’t end in a poetic appreciation for nature’s majesty, but by teasing out its implications for the political project of preserving a habitable planet. Hickel devotes much of the book to explaining that degrowth must be central to this project, promising not just survival, but real democracy, social abundance, and liberation.

Both involve broad social shifts away from private consumption and toward the production of shared public goods.

This beautiful coincidence overlaps with policy programs like the Green New Deal in important way

In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take public transit more, value community over material things, and buy bonds to fund domestic energy development, including solar

Next to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics,” Debsian socialism was reformist tinkering. Schumacher didn’t see liberation as a matter of reshuffling the ownership and management structures of the smokestack-powered growth economy. He believed a deeper transformation was needed to maintain a livable planet. This would require new socioecological blueprints “designed for permanence.” As the left and the right battled for control over growth’s levers and spoils, Schumacher pointed out how both had become blind to the rise of growth as its own self-justifying, pan-ideological religion; its patterns of production and consumption, he observed, required “a degree of violence” that did not “fit into the laws of the universe.”

They determined that infinite growth was, in fact, impossible on a finite planet. Barring a major course correction, the team projected, growthism would result in an ecological systems breakdown sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century

This warning, detailed in the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, has aged better than the scorn heaped on it

We are now witnessing what appears to be the beginnings of the collapse predicted nearly 50 years ago

In his new book, Less Is More, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist and journalist, attempts to bring a comprehensive critique of growth closer to the center of the conversation, arguing through a sweeping history of capitalism that it’s uncontrolled growth, not its controlled arrest and reversal, that is the preposterous concept.

This economic and political revolution was reinforced by a complementary scientific one that displaced the lingering animist cosmology of pre-capitalist Europe. The dualism of Francis Bacon and Descartes held reason to be distinct from and superior to matter.

The idea of limitless growth is a relatively recent one. In Less Is More, Hickel traces its origins to the enclosure of the European commons in the sixteenth century

Starving refugees were scattered and forced into a new economy defined by neo-feudal servitude and wage labor. Landowners, meanwhile, began amassing great stores of surplus wealth.

By the mid-1800s, a new “science” had arisen from these assumptions. Neoclassical economics fully abstracted the economy from the natural world. The economy was geared not toward the creation of a happy and prosperous society, but toward the perpetual growth of wealth as its own end, achieved in an inherently virtuous cycle of converting labor and resources into capital, to be accumulated and reinvested in faster and more productive conversions of labor and resources

This ideology subsumed and profaned notions about progress and morality held by the classical economists, until eventually the field even l

This process unfolded despite repeated warnings along the way. Classical economists like John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith not only acknowledged the existence of natural limits to growth, but saw economic development as a phase; at some point, they believed, nations would create enough wealth to pursue other definitions of progres

the caveats issued by Simon Kuznets, father of the concept adopted in the twentieth century as growth’s universal and signature metric: gross domestic product. Kuznets, Hickel points out, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress,” because GDP does not distinguish between productive and destructive behavior

Most people encounter the growth debate, if they encounter it at all, through the idea of “green growth.

This is a vision for our collective future based on the belief that technological advance will drastically reduce the amount of raw materials needed to sustain growth—a process known as dematerialization—and “decouple” growing GDP from its ecological impacts.

boosters of the idea point to the transition by rich countries from manufacturing to service-based economies, as well as efficiency gains in energy and in the use of materials

The belief that green growth will save us, also known as “ecomodernism” or “ecopragmatism,” has become a trendy article of faith among elites who acknowledge climate change and the dangers of breaching ecological boundaries

n 2017, Barack Obama threw his support behind the idea in an article for Science magazine, maintaining that signs of decoupling in major economies “should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.”

The argument that capitalism can grow itself out of the present crisis may be soothing to those who like the world as it is. It also relies on the kind of accounting tricks and rejection of reality

By only counting the emissions created within a country that imports most of its cars, washing machines, and computers, you end up pushing the emissions related to their production off the books. When you factor them back in, the picture is much less green. A number of recent studies show no evidence of meaningful decoupling—in energy or materials—even as the world increases its use of renewable energy and finds ways to use some materials more efficiently.

Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent “fairy tale.”

consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years

he economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200.

Hickel is less interested in the macroeconomic details of this future than are growth critics based in economics departments, like Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth, and more focused on the leisure, security, and general human flourish

he makes an alluring case that degrowth does not require anything like the “command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment.”

Attaining the benefits of the post-growth economy would, however, require what the present consumer society considers “sacrifices.

it’s not clear how many of them are ready to give up its superficial pleasures enabled by consumer debt

Among nations, there’s also the question of fairness: Wouldn’t it be unjust to impose degrowth across the world, when it’s disproportionately the countries of the global north that have spent centuries burning through the planet’s resources?

This output tracks to the one percent’s share of global wealth—a number equal to the GDP of the bottom 169 countries.

Even if you accept the argument that inequality would be best addressed by more centuries of trickle-down growth, you keep running up against the simple fact of its impossibility. Even just one more century of growth—which so far has shown no sign of taking a less destructive form—will require multiple earths

Hickel is serious about bringing the system critiques of E.F. Schumacher and others out of their traditional cloisters and into the streets, and has sought allies in this effort

emphasize what Hickel calls the “beautiful coincidence” of degrowth: that “what we need to do to survive is the same as what we need to do to have better lives.”

Both are internationalist in outlook, and see the world through a lens of climate justice as well as climate equilibrium.

that is, communicating the many benefits of moving beyond the insecurity and terrors of the current system, and building a new society that is sustainable, stable, democratic, and fundamentally better in every way.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because we basically saw this same environmental dynamic play out several years ago with tech’s last big obsession: Crypto and web3. In that case, Bitcoin emerged as the industry’s obvious environmental sore spot due to the vast amounts of energy needed to mine coins in its proof of work model. Some estimates suggest Bitocin alone requires more energy every year than Norway’s annual electricity consumption.

rs of criticism from environmental activists however led the crypto industry to make some changes. Ethereum, the second largest currency on the blockchain, officially switched last year to a proof of stake model which supporters claim could reduce its power usage by over 99%. Other smaller coins similarly were designed with energy efficiency in mind. In the grand scheme of things, large language models are still in their infancy and it’s far from certain how its environmental report card will play out.

Globalization helps drive these patterns to new extremes. Money flows into suburbs like San Marino and Palos Verdes, where Asian immigrants buy up expensive properties and generously donate their time and money to the local schools. Money flows out of poorer suburbs like South Gate, Bell and Huntington Park, all heavily Latino, where disposable income is tight and many families export remittances to a home country. New poverty builds upon old impoverishment. Infrastructure is stretched as renters crowd into dwellings that were modest to begin with. The toxic footprint of departed industries is left behind for new residents to contend with.

Many of Los Angeles’s middling suburbs have also slipped, especially those ravaged by plant closures since the 1980s. The southern section of blue-collar suburbs was hit especially hard. Here, suburbia transformed from comfortable communities housing unionized workers with well-paying jobs in local factories that gave them access to a middle-class lifestyle to fiscally strained communities housing immigrants working in low-paying, nonunion jobs.

Outer suburbs have fared little better. As home costs skyrocketed in recent decades, families chased “affordable” housing to the exurbs. They took on outsize mortgages and monster commutes, and they took with them congested roads, smog and sprawl. Compounding these strains, tax revenues lagged behind the cost of schools, roads, parks and libraries — the very infrastructure necessary to sustain middle-class life. This edifice came crashing down in the recession.

Policies to redress suburban inequality must focus not only on factors like income but also on tax equity across metro areas and regional planning that fairly distributes resources and responsibilities (like affordable housing). We should limit the mortgage-interest deduction for second homes and for values above the regional median. These steps would reduce distortions that inflate housing prices and concentrate wealth in what are already wealthy places.

What is a reasonable “income floor” above which we should hope all people worldwide live? At the moment, we define $1.25 as extreme poverty and $2 as poverty, plain and simple.

The global median income is around $3 to $4 a day. Despite the fact that 50 percent of the population of the planet lives on less than that today, that’s still an insufficient floor.

those living on more than $2 a day in developing countries see infant mortality rates five times those of the poorest and most deprived areas of rich countries. It’s possible to reduce death rates considerably using very cheap techniques, from bed nets to vaccines, but at some point the approaches start getting more expensive. 

Pritchett suggests the global floor should be something closer to the poverty lines of rich countries—around $15 per day. Other economists have suggested the “global middle class” bottoms out at an income of around $10 per day.

Worldwide, somewhere shy of 2 billion make it over the $10 line. But only about two percent (PDF) of sub-Saharan Africa lives on more than $10 a day, compared with 51 percent who live at more than $1.25 a day

until you get above $10 per day, high-income economies still see a very small proportion of their population in “global poverty.”

According to the World Bank, current world GDP is about $76.4 trillion, of which about 62 percent is consumed by households. If all 7 billion people on the planet lived on $10 a day, that would take $26 trillion, or (give or take) a $41 trillion global economy

If it weren’t for the incredible size of global income disparities, you could shrink the world’s economy, reduce our environmental footprint, and still get everyone over the poverty line.

There’s a lot more to quality of life than income. In fact, the greatest development success of the past 60 years has been to make the quality of life cheaper. 

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret slides that provides a window into the inner workings of the U.S. military’s kill/capture operations at a key time in the evolution of the drone wars — between 2011 and 2013. The documents, which also outline the internal views of special operations forces on the shortcomings and flaws of the drone program, were provided by a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides.

The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.

Two sets of slides focus on the military’s high-value targeting campaign in Somalia and Yemen as it existed between 2011 and 2013, specifically the operations of a secretive unit, Task Force 48-4.

The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes. Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the U.S. would only conduct a lethal strike outside of an “area of active hostilities” if a target represents a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried.

One top-secret document shows how the terror “watchlist” appears in the terminals of personnel conducting drone operations, linking unique codes associated with cellphone SIM cards and handsets to specific individuals in order to geolocate them.

The ISR study also reveals new details about the case of a British citizen, Bilal el-Berjawi, who was stripped of his citizenship before being killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012. British and American intelligence had Berjawi under surveillance for several years as he traveled back and forth between the U.K. and East Africa, yet did not capture him. Instead, the U.S. hunted him down and killed him in Somalia.

Taken together, the secret documents lead to the conclusion that Washington’s 14-year high-value targeting campaign suffers from an overreliance on signals intelligence, an apparently incalculable civilian toll, and — due to a preference for assassination rather than capture — an inability to extract potentially valuable intelligence from terror suspects.

They also highlight the futility of the war in Afghanistan by showing how the U.S. has poured vast resources into killing local insurgents, in the process exacerbating the very threat the U.S. is seeking to confront.

These secret slides help provide historical context to Washington’s ongoing wars, and are especially relevant today as the U.S. military intensifies its drone strikes and covert actions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Those campaigns, like the ones detailed in these documents, are unconventional wars that employ special operations forces at the tip of the spear.

Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Yet if keeping the peace means embracing Mr. Trump and his most divisive ideas and utterances, a growing number are loath to do it.

“Because Paul Ryan, and I love him to death, but he’s one of those career politicians.

“Trump leveraged a perfect storm,” said Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in an email message. “

After seething at Washington for so long, hundreds or thousands of miles from the capital, many of these voters now see Mr. Trump as a kind of savior.

Many Republican voters trudged along with those earlier nominees, but never became truly animated until Mr. Trump offered them his brand of angry populism: a blend of protectionism at home and a smaller American footprint abroad.

“Everything is subject to negotiation, but I can’t and won’t be changing much, because the voters support me because of what I’m saying and how I’m saying it,” Mr. Trump said.

. Leaders such as Mr. Romney warned in the direst terms that Mr. Trump’s nomination would stain the party and lead it to ruin. Venerable media outlets on the right,

On the left, too, Senator Bernie Sanders has built his own movement with millions of voters, and $210 million in fund-raising, by using online tools as simple as email to seek support.

The adhesive that once held Republicans together — a shared commitment to a strong national defense and limited government

Alongside the turbulent economy were signs of something more profound plaguing blue-collar white communities, which have increasingly become core Republican constituencies: an increase in children born to single parents, higher rates of addiction and suicide, and shortened average life spans.

The party has never been more out of touch with our voters,” Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman, said of the two factions, acknowledging that Republicans could splinter completely after this election. “I don’t know how you reconcile a lot of them.”

Finally, the government directly created jobs — whether in the burst of infrastructure investment in the 1930s that gave us the Hoover Dam, among other huge projects, or the tenfold increase in federal spending from 1939 to 1945 as the government built up the military-industrial complex to fight Germany and Japan

Why American politics turned against this successful model of pragmatic policy-making remains controversial. Perhaps it was the increasing footprint of money in politics, which has given more clout to corporate interests lobbying for smaller government and lower taxes. Maybe desegregation led to increasing distrust in government by white voters. Perhaps it was the combination of a recession and high inflation of the 1970s, which discredited interventionist government policies.

The good news is that the United States may have the best opportunity in decades to overcome its anti-government political biases. Donald J. Trump, the admittedly unusual Republican standard-bearer, has publicly called for extensive public investment in infrastructure. More orthodox Republicans, like the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, are also expressing interest in using government levers to tackle the lack of prospects for so many American workers.