the age of loneliness: Brooke Jarvis, “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” The New York Times Magazine, November 27, 2018.
“scientific reticence”: J. E. Hansen, “Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise,” Environmental Research Letters 2 (May 2007).
a 2017 Nature paper: Daniel A. Chapman et al., “Reassessing Emotion in Climate Change Communication,” Nature Climate Change (November 2017): pp. 850–52.
IPCC released a dramatic, alarmist report: IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (Incheon, Korea, 2018), www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15.
Crisis Capitalism
The scroll of cognitive biases: The single best primer on what behavioral economics has to teach us about these biases is by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013).
the scope of the climate threat: This is why the theorist Timothy Morton refers to climate change as a “hyperobject.” But while the term is useful in suggesting just how large climate change is, and just how poorly we’ve been able to perceive that scale to date, the deeper you get into Morton’s analysis, the less illuminating it becomes. In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), he names five characteristics: hyperobjects are 1) viscous, by which he means that they stick to any object or idea they come into contact with, like oil; 2) molten, by which he means so big, they seem to defy our sense of space-time; 3) nonlocal, by which he means distributed in ways that frustrate any attempt to perceive them entirely from a single perspective; 4) phased, by which he means that they have dimensional qualities we cannot understand, as we wouldn’t understand a five-dimensional object passing through our three-dimensional space; and 5) interobjective, by which he means that they connect divergent items and systems. Viscous, nonlocal, and interobjective—okay. But these do not make global warming a different kind of phenomenon than we have seen before, or than those—like capitalism, say—that we actually understand quite well. As for the other qualities…If climate change defies our sense of space-time, it is only because we have an impoverished, narrow idea of space-time, since in fact warming is taking place very much within our planet’s atmosphere, not inexplicably but in ways scientists have predicted quite precisely over decades. That we have failed to deal with it, over those same decades, does not mean it is literally beyond our comprehension. Saying so sounds almost like a cop-out, in fact.
“It is easier to imagine”: Jameson wrote this in “Future City,” published in New Left Review in May–June 2003.
pet theory of the socialist Left: Degrees of emphasis vary, of course, but you can find forms of the “fossil capitalism” argument in Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization, along with Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital and Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life.
Can capitalism survive climate change?: Moore raises this question in Capitalism in the Web of Life, and it is discussed at some length in Benjamin Kunkel, “The Capitalocene,” London Review of Books, March 2, 2017.
Klein memorably sketched out: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).
the island of Puerto Rico: Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018).
Maria could cut Puerto Rican incomes: This comes from Hsiang and Houser’s “Don’t Let Puerto Rico Fall into an Economic Abyss,” The New York Times, September 29, 2017.
carbon emissions have exploded: According to the International Energy Agency, total global emissions were 32.5 gigatons in 2017, up from 22.4 in 1990. Of course, it is worth remembering that the world’s socialist nations, and even its left-of-center ones, do not have a notably better record when it comes to emissions than its excessively capitalistic ones. This suggests that it may be a bit misleading to describe emissions as having been driven by capitalism per se, or even interests made especially prominent and powerful within capitalistic systems. Instead, it may reflect the universal power of material comforts, benefits that we tend to assess using only a very short-term calculus.
“Neoliberalism: Oversold?”: This paper, by Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, was published in June 2016.
something like a fantasy field: Romer published “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” on his own website on September 14, 2016.
Nordhaus favors a carbon tax: The Nobel laureate has published widely on the subject of the carbon tax, and he gives the most plainspoken account of the tax level he considers optimal in “Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017, https://www.nber.org/reporter/2017number3/nordhaus.html.
$306 billion: Adam B. Smith, “2017 U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: A Historic Year in Context,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, January 8, 2018.
$551 trillion in damages: “Risks Associated with Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees Celsius or 2 Degrees Celsius,” Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, May 2018.
23 percent of potential global income: Marshall Burke et al., “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production,” Nature 527 (October 2015): pp. 235–39, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725.
Of 400 IPCC emissions models: “Negative Emissions Technologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets?” European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, February 2018.
a third of the world’s farmable land: Jason Hickel, “The Paris Agreement Is Deeply Flawed—It’s Time for a New Deal,” Al Jazeera, March 16, 2018.
a paper by David Keith: David Keith et al., “A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere,” Joule, August 15, 2018.
total global fossil fuel subsidies: David Coady et al., “How Large Are Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies?” World Development 91 (March 2017): pp. 11–27.
$2.3 trillion tax cut: David Rogers, “At $2.3 Trillion Cost, Trump Tax Cuts Leave Big Gap,” Politico, February 28, 2018. Other estimates run higher.
The Church of Technology
outlined by Eric Schmidt: He laid out this perspective most clearly at a conference in New York in January 2016.
“Consider: Who pursues”: Ted Chiang, “Silicon Valley Is Turning into Its Own Worst Fear,” BuzzFeed, December 18, 2017.
an influential 2002 paper: Nick Bostrom, “Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (March 2002).