“no discernible increased incidence”: United Nations, “Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation” (May 2013): p. 11, www.unscear.org/docs/GAreports/A-68-46_e_V1385727.pdf.
an additional 1,400 Americans: Lisa Friedman, “Cost of New E.P.A. Coal Rules: Up to 1,400 More Deaths a Year,” The New York Times, August 21, 2018.
nine million each year: Pamela Das and Richard Horton, “Pollution, Health, and the Planet: Time for Decisive Action,” The Lancet 391, no. 10119 (October 2017): pp. 407–8, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32588-6.
growing its carbon emissions: James Conca, “Why Aren’t Renewables Decreasing Germany’s Carbon Emissions?” Forbes, October 10, 2017.
“How many will play augmented reality games”: Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018).
The poet and musician Kate Tempest: These are lyrics to her song “Tunnel Vision.”
Politics of Consumption
a note, handwritten: Annie Correal, “What Drove a Man to Set Himself on Fire in Brooklyn?” The New York Times, May 28, 2018.
a longer letter, typed: For an in-depth account of this letter, see Theodore Parisienne et al., “Famed Gay Rights Lawyer Sets Himself on Fire at Prospect Park in Protest Suicide Against Fossil Fuels,” New York Daily News, April 14, 2018.
moral arms race: Citizens who now clean their consciences with philanthropic donations directed toward medical research, college scholarships, or museums and literary magazines may begin increasingly to do so by buying carbon offsets or investing in carbon-capture funds (indeed, some progressive nations may invest the proceeds of carbon taxes directly into CCS and BECCS). Progressive scientists will apply gene therapy to climate change, as they have already begun to do with the woolly mammoth—which they hope, once brought back to life, might restore the grasslands of the Eurasian steppe and prevent methane release from permafrost—and will probably do soon with the mosquito, hoping to eradicate mosquito-borne disease. Perhaps a rogue billionaire will try to single-handedly cool the earth with geoengineering, flying a few private planes around the equator to disperse sulfur and citing the model of Bill Gates and his mosquito nets.
“apparatus of justification”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
SoulCycle, Goop, Moon Juice: The founder of hipster foodie magazine Modern Farmer is, in 2018, rumored to be launching a “Goop for climate change.”
the pesticide Roundup: Alexis Temkin, “Breakfast with a Dose of Roundup?” Environmental Working Group Children’s Health Initiative, August 15, 2018, www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/glyphosateincereal.
elaborate guidance: “During a wildfire, dust masks aren’t enough!” the National Weather Service warned on Facebook. “They won’t protect you from the fine particles in wildfire smoke. It is best to stay indoors, keeping windows and doors closed. If you’re running an air conditioner, keep the fresh-air intake closed and the filter clean to prevent outdoor smoke from getting inside.”
“philanthrocapitalism”: Perhaps the most piercing account of this phenomenon is Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take Alclass="underline" The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Knopf, 2018).
“moral economy”: This story is recounted in Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); see also Tehila Sasson’s review, published in Dissent under the headline “The Gospel of Wealth,” August 22, 2018.
asked to be entrepreneurs: Stephen Metcalf, among many others, has written memorably about this phenomenon, in his brief history of neoliberalism, “Neoliberalism: The Idea That Swallowed the World,” The Guardian, August 18, 2017.
Climate Leviathan: Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (London: Verso, 2018).
In 2018, an illuminating study: Katharine Ricke et al., “Country-Level Social Cost of Carbon,” Nature Climate Change 8 (September 2018): pp. 895–900.
Belt and Road Initiative: Perhaps the best account of this initiative is Bruno Maçães’s Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (London: Hurst, 2018). The initiative “may also promote permanent environmental degradation,” a group of researchers argued recently. (Fernando Ascensão et al., “Environmental Challenges for the Belt and Road Initiative,” Nature Sustainability, May 2018).
the possibility of disequilibrium: Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
pulls criminals out of pop concerts: According to The Washington Post’s Hamza Shaban, this happened three times in just two months in the spring of 2018: “Facial Recognition Cameras in China Snag Man Who Allegedly Stole $17,000 Worth of Potatoes,” May 22, 2018.
domestic-spy drones: Stephen Chen, “China Takes Surveillance to New Heights with Flock of Robotic Doves, but Do They Come in Peace?” South China Morning Post, June 24, 2018.
History After Progress
most unshakable creeds: It wasn’t just the promise of growth that was invented in the industrial era, but the idea of history, which promises that the past tells a story of human progress—and suggests, therefore, that the future will, too.
This progressive faith has a demotic basis, which is that daily life changed so quickly in the Victorian era that no one with eyes open could have missed it. It also has an intellectual one, which is that philosophers from Hegel to Comte proposed, at various points in the nineteenth century, that history had a shape—that it evolved, in one form or another, toward the light, of one kind or another. The idea would not have confused readers of their contemporaries Darwin and Spencer. Nor, for that matter, visitors to Queen Victoria’s Crystal Palace exhibition, the first World’s Fair, which organized national showcases into an implicit competition of relative development and more or less promised that technology would bring about a better future for all. By the time Jacob Burckhardt was writing his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which furnished the now-proverbial three-act structure of Western history—antiquity followed by the Dark Ages followed by modernity—he could imagine himself as an opponent of both Hegel and Comte and yet nevertheless produce a work that explicitly periodized the past into a single unfolding drama. That is how thoroughly the idea of progressive history had taken hold in a time of rapid social, economic, and cultural change: even critics of reflexive Western triumphalism tended to see history as marching forward. Marx is the clearest example: squint at his reimagined Hegelianism, and its shape looks a lot like the enduring wall-chart of history first published by Sebastian Adams—motivated by Christian evangelism, amazingly—in 1871. In 1920, H. G. Wells published his influential version, The Outline of History; in it, he declared that “the history of mankind,” which he traced through forty chapters from “The Earth in Space and Time” to “The Next Stage of History,” “is a history of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily.” It sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages, and it casts a shadow over nearly every project of popular, long-view history undertaken since, from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.