The Game Has Begun Quotes

So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game to find a way to say that life has just begun.

I intercepted Chaol, and he informed me of your ‘condition.’ You’d think a man in his position wouldn’t be so squeamish, especially after examining all of those corpses.” Calaena opened an eye and frowned as Dorian sat on her bed. “I’m in a state of absolute agony and I can’t be bothered.” “It can’t be that bad,” he said, fishing a deck of cards from his jacket. “Want to play?” “I already told you that I don’t feel well.” “You look fine to me.” He skillfully shuffled the deck. “Just one game.” “Don’t you pay people to entertain you?” He glowered, breaking the deck. “You should be honored by my company.” “I’d be honored if you would leave.” “For someone who relies on my good graces, you’re very bold.” “Bold? I’ve barely begun.” Lying on her side, she curled her knees to her chest. He laughed, pocketing the deck of cards. “Your new canine companion is doing well, if you wish to know.” She moaned into her pillow. “Go away. I feel like dying.” “No fair maiden should die alone,” he said, putting a hand on hers. “Shall I read to you in your final moments? What story would you like?” She snatched her hand back. “How about the story of the idiotic prince who won’t leave the assassin alone?” “Oh! I love that story! It has such a happy ending, too—why, the assassin was really feigning her illness in order to get the prince’s attention! Who would have guessed it? Such a clever girl. And the bedroom scene is so lovely—it’s worth reading through all of their ceaseless banter!” “Out! Out! Out! Leave me be and go womanize someone else!” She grabbed a book and chucked it at him.

A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope—the only obligation is honesty...

In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing.

For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight

Sejanus. “My friend, your life has just begun!” And then Coriolanus was laughing; they both were. “So this isn’t our ruin?” “I’d call it our salvation.

Neither the Pilgrims nor the Indians new what they had begun. The Pilgrims called the celebration a Harvest Feast. The Indians thought of it as a Green Corn Dance. It was both and more than both. It was the first Thanksgiving. In the years that followed, President George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation, and President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November a holiday of “thanksgiving and praise.” Today it is still a harvest festival and Green Corn Dance. Families feast with friends, give thanks and play games. Plymouth Rock did not fare as well. It has been cut in half, moved twice, dropped, split and trimmed to fit its present-day portico. It is a mere memento of its once magnificent self. Yet to Americans, Plymouth Rock is a symbol. It is larger than the mountains, wider than the prairies and stronger than all our rivers. It is the rock on which our nation began.

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question.

Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it- it's part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence.

A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning.

His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.

Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."

I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we've been able to forget that the natural world even exists...a great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion.

So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it's the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can't solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

So scared of getting older I'm only good at being young So I play the numbers game To find a way to say that life has just begun

Privilege lies in obliviousness. (White privilege, for instance, involves being able to reliably forget that race matters.)

Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago.

The human game is a team sport.

The game has already begun.

Let's be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let's assume we're capable of acting together to do remarkable things.

We have, in other words, changed the energy balance of our planet, the amount of the sun’s heat that is returned to space. Those of us who burn lots of fossil fuel have changed the way the world operates, fundamentally.

And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

when investigative reporters proved that Exxon had known all about global warming and had covered up that knowledge. Plenty of people on the professionally jaded left told me, in one form or another, “Of course they did,” or “All corporations lie,” or “Nothing will ever happen to them anyway.” This kind of knowing cynicism is no threat to the Exxons of the world—it’s a gift. Happily, far more people reacted with usefully naïve outrage: before too long, people were comparing the oil giants with the tobacco companies, and some of the biggest cities in the country were suing them for damages. We don’t know yet precisely how it will end, only that giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense.

I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.” “Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.” “No. You don’t understand.” My throat is tight; I feel as though I’m being strangled. “I couldn’t keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn’t true, and you were still gone. I—I wasn’t strong enough.” He is quiet for a second. It’s too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me. Finally he says, “When they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn’t even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.” “Alex.” The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach. “I didn’t die. I don’t know how. I should have. I’d lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game—to see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I’d—” He breaks off abruptly. I can’t hear any more; don’t want to know, don’t want it to be true, can’t stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue. “Alex.” I repeat his name like a prayer, like a magic spell that will make everything okay again. I run my hands up his chest and to his chin. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Suddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. “There were days I would rather they have killed me.” He doesn’t drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. “There were days I asked for it—prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you—the hope for it—was the only thing that kept me going.” He releases me and takes another step backward. “So no. I don’t understand.

Actually, the worst possible plan would also include trying to squash action in every other country, too. And that’s what the entire government-hating network managed to achieve in 2017, when President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. It was as shameful a moment as any in our recent history: the country that produces more carbon than any other announcing that it was now the only country on earth not willing to make even a modest international commitment to solving climate change.

Once upon a time there was a little king, whose dreams always brought him new wings, but his fate never knew what he could bring, so carried on a life that just delivered stings. One day he met the song he wished to sing, but didnt seem to understand this one little thing, how can the wind stop at the sound of broken strings, how can he spend a childhood alone on a swing. He stands alone empty with a promise in waiting, his story has just begun tall and refusing, he knows his game well but no dream is he using, but the sleep fate has taken has his dreams aging.

In the bourgeois democratic countries the need for using intrinsically good means to achieve desirable ends is more clearly realized than in Russia. But even in these countries enormous mistakes have been made in the past and still greater, still more dangerous mistakes are in process of being committed today. Most of these mistakes are due to the fact that, though professing belief in our ideal postulates, the rulers and people of these countries are, to some extent and quite incompatibly, also militarists and nationalists. The English and the French, it is true, are sated militarists whose chief desire is to live a quiet life, holding fast to what they seized in their unregenerate days of imperial highway-robbery. Confronted by rivals who want to do now what they were doing from the beginning of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, they profess and doubtless genuinely feel a profound moral indignation. Meanwhile, they have begun to address themselves, reluctantly but with determination, to the task of beating the Fascist powers at their own game. Like the Fascist states, they are preparing for war. but modern war cannot be waged or even prepared except by a highly centralized executive wielding absolute power over a docile people. Most of the planning which is going on in the democratic countries is planning designed to transform these countries into the likeness of totalitarian communities organized for slaughter and rapine. Hitherto this transformation has proceeded fairly slowly. Belief in our idea postulates has acted as a brake on fascization, which has had to advance gradually and behind a smoke screen. But if war is declared, or even if the threat of war becomes more serious than at present, the process will become open and rapid. "The defence of democracy against Fascism" entails inevitably the transformation of democracy into Fascism.

Then call me Pierce because we're friends." He bent in close in the turn, eyes gleaming as they dropped to her lips. "Intimate friends, if I get my wish." This time there was no mistaking his meaning. But he was so practiced and smooth that she couldn't help herself-she laughed. When that made him frown, she tried to suppress her amusement, but that only made her laugh harder. "What's so funny?" he muttered. "I'm sorry," she said, swallowing her amusement. "It's just that I've heard my brothers make such insinuations to women in that tone of voice for years, but I've never been on the receiving end." Pierce's smile would rival that of Casanova. "I don't know why not," he said in a lazy drawl. His gaze raked her appreciatively as they swirled about the room. "Tonight, in that purple gown, you look particularly fetching. The color suits you." "Thank you." Minerva had been trying to get her to stop wearing browns and oranges for years, but Celia had always pooh-poohed her sister's opinions. It was only after Virginia had said exactly the same thing last month that she'd begun to think she should listen. And to order new gowns accordingly. "You're a lovely woman with the figure of a Venus and a mouth that could make a man-" "You can stop now." Her amusement vanished. She'd be flattered if he meant a single word, but clearly this was just a game to him. "I don't need the full rogue treatment, I assure you." Interest sparked in his eyes. "Hasn't it occurred to you that I might be sincere?" "Only if you're sincerely trying to seduce me." He cast her a blatantly carnal glance as he held her tighter. "Well, of course I'm trying to seduce you. What else would I be doing?" She pitched her voice over the music. "I'm a respectable woman, you know." "What has that got to do with anything?" She arched an eyebrow at him as they moved in consort. "Even a respectable woman might be tempted into, say, slipping out with a gentleman for a walk in the moonlit courtyard. And if said gentleman should happen to steal a kiss or two-" "Lord Devonmont!" "Fine." He smiled ruefully. "Bu you can't blame me for trying. You do look ravishing this evening." "There you go again," she said, exasperated. "Can you never talk to a woman as if she's a normal person?" "How dull that would be." When she frowned, he shook his head. "Very well. What scintillating topics of conversation did you have in mind?

So far, we have warmed the earth by roughly two degrees Fahrenheit, which in a masterpiece of understatement the New York Times once described as “a large number for the surface of an entire planet.”9 This is humanity’s largest accomplishment, and indeed the largest thing any one species has ever done on our planet, at least since the days two billion years ago when cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, killing off much of the rest of the archaic life on the planet.

So far, we’re not coping with them.

They “cannot be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world,” said one Australian researcher.

A sixty-nine-year-old rancher walked among them with a rifle. “They’re gentle,” he said. “They know us. We know them. You just thought, ‘Wow, I am sorry.’ You think you’re done and the next day you got to go shoot more.

An easy rule of thumb is that for every drought, a flood.

That’s 127 billion tons, enough weight that Houston actually sank by a couple of centimeters. In places, the rainfall topped fifty-four inches, by far the largest rainstorm in American history.

the storm dumped the equivalent of all the water in Chesapeake Bay.

In the Northeast United States, where I live in landlocked Vermont, we’ve watched extreme precipitation (two inches or more of rain in twenty-four hours) grow 53 percent more common since 1996.

Much of the sea ice that filled the Arctic in the early pictures from space is gone now—viewed from a distance, Earth looks strikingly different.

A 2018 study concluded that even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, more than a third of the planet’s glacial ice would melt anyway in the coming decades.

one standard deviation increase in temperature supposedly increases conflicts between groups by 14 percent46—but you hardly need them. Common sense will

The president blamed the conflagration on “forest mismanagement” and recommended “raking”; meanwhile forensic teams tried to recover the victims’ DNA from the ashes of burned-out subdivisions.

The paper, in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening. But it seems to be true: when researchers grow grain at the carbon dioxide levels we expect for later this century, they find that minerals such as calcium and iron drop by 8 percent, and protein by about the same amount.

leverage.

Unlike the fishes of the Permian, we’ve been given a warning. Unlike the sauropods of the Cretaceous, we can do something about it. As Peter Brannen wrote in his history of the great cataclysms, “Thankfully we still have time”26—though clearly not much.

Privilege lies in obliviousness. (White privilege, for instance, involves being able to reliably forget that race matters.) One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we’ve been able to forget that the natural world even exists.

By the 1890s, when Frederick Jackson Turner was declaring the frontier closed, another new continent was opening up, this one underground. Humans everywhere were quickly learning to burn fossil fuels, and so once again our range was expanding.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes once calculated that from “two thousand years before Christ down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was really no great change in the standard of living of the average man in the civilized centers of the earth.

By 2100, the most recent study notes, “even under the most optimistic predictions for emissions reductions, experts say almost half the world’s population will be exposed to potentially deadly heat for twenty days a year.

Another study from the same year found that as hotter days led to more evaporation, corn and soybean yields across the U.S. Grain Belt could fall by 22 to 49 percent. Extensive irrigation could help—except that we’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the world’s breadbaskets.

The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles, but the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.

The world, its leaders and its citizens, effectively knew nothing of the threat until the hot June day in 1988 when a mid-career NASA scientist named James Hansen testified before a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.

But, as it turned out, that didn’t really happen. In the three decades since, global carbon emissions have nearly doubled. More than half of all the greenhouse gases emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution have spewed from exhaust pipes and smokestacks since 1988.

Two Cornell professors, Robert Howarth and Tony Ingraffea, produced a series of elegant papers showing that if even a small percentage of fracked gas leaked, maybe as little as 3 percent, then it would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high—that between the fracking operations and the thousands of miles of pipes and the compressor stations, somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.

land. For one, the ocean is where most of that extra heat accumulates. Though we focus on the heat in the air around us, about 93 percent of the extra heat is actually collecting in the sea. The deep sea is now warming about nine times faster than it was in the 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s.3 (It goes without saying that the Trump administration has proposed big cutbacks for the agency that maintains the network of temperature-monitoring buoys.)

The overwhelming threat comes, again, from the fossil fuel we burn and the effects of the carbon dioxide that it produces, effects that are even larger in the sea than on the

Hope and Fear Are Inseparable.” ― Francois De La Rochefoucau Ludlum There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for. - J.R.R. Tolkien “For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent and set me high upon a rock. ― Psalms Twenty Seven : Five “ You will never forget a person who came to you with a torch in the dark.” ― Unknown “Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” ― Mark Twain “The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.”― Mark Twain “Family isn’t always blood, It's the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what. “ ― Maya Angelo “In spite of the shame, in spite of the sleepless nights, I'm coping. I'm not pretending it wasn't real. I'm not playing games in my mind. I wouldn't go back to the way I was, naive. I'm a different person now. I know I'm courageous, and without blame. I’ve realized I have it in me to stand up against this horror. — ADC "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." ― Jeremiah Twenty-Nine: Eleven “The universe doesn’t give you what you ask for with your thoughts - it gives you what you demand with your actions.” ― Steve Maraboli Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run, Go on, take the money and run! - Steve Miller Band “What separates us from the other killers, is we only kill bad people.”― Vigilante and “Some people just need killing.” ― Barry Eisler “In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.” ― George R. R. Martin “Wherever there is abuse there is also corruption. Politics, philosophy, theology, science, industry, any field with the potential to affect the well-being of others can be destroyed by abuse or saved by good will.” ― Criss Jami “True life is lived when tiny changes occur." ― Leo “You do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life, really? It is a vapor that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away” ― James Four: Fourteen “In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.” Buddha

More recently, a new generation of languages has begun to emerge. These languages—Small-Talk, C++, Java—are object-oriented. They treat a data structure—for instance, a picture to be drawn on the screen—as an “object” with its own internal state, such as where it is to be drawn or what color it is. These objects can receive instructions from other objects. To understand why this is useful, imagine that you are writing a program for a video game involving bouncing balls. Each ball on the screen is defined as a different object. The program specifies rules of behavior that tell the object how to draw itself on the screen, move, bounce, and interact with other objects in the game. Each ball will exhibit similar behavior, but each will be in a slightly different state, because each will be in its own position on the screen and will have its own color, velocity, size, and so forth.

wholly healed by 2060. And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.

So, let’s remember exactly what we’ve been up to, because it should fill us with awe; it’s by far the biggest thing humans have ever done.

Even during the dramatic moments at the end of the Permian Age, when most life went extinct, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps one-tenth the current pace.

Petrarch talked about the source of the Po, and so did Chaucer and Dante. But they lived on a planet with 40 percent less carbon dioxide.

Testimony submitted by climate scientists to a federal court in 2017, for instance, said that if we don’t take much stronger action now, future citizens would have to pay $535 trillion to cope with global warming.

the two women donned the traditional dress of their respective homelands and hiked farther up the glacier, till they could see both the ocean and the high ice. And there they performed a poem they’d composed, a cry from angry and engaged hearts about the overwhelming fact of their lives. The

Climate change is currently costing the U.S. economy about $240 billion a year,

And yet nothing slows us down—just the opposite. By most accounts, we’ve used more energy and resources during the last thirty-five years than in all of human history that came before.

I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic, just realistic—enough to know engagement is our only chance.

The earth seems, after all, like a robust place: its ice sheets are miles thick, its oceans miles deep. But the lesson of the last thirty years is unequivocal: the planet was actually finely balanced, and the shove we’ve given it has knocked it very much askew. Let’s look for a long minute at what has happened so far, remembering always that we’re still in the early stages of global warming and that things will proceed inevitably from worse to worse yet and then keep on going.

A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope—the only obligation is honesty—but I want those who pick up this volume to know that its author lives in a state of engagement, not despair.

173 people died in a blaze that raced through the suburbs.

director of University College London’s Hazard Centre.3

drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once

connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high.

Several meters in the next fifty to 150 years,” said James Hansen, the planet’s premier climatologist, who added that such a rise would make coastal cities “practically ungovernable.”20 As Jeff Goodell (who in 2017 wrote the most comprehensive book to date on sea level rise) put it, such a rise would “create generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production

We all have losses already. Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down.

Particular people in particular places at a particular moment in time following a particular philosophic bent: that’s leverage piled on top of leverage. And their ability to skew our politics with their wealth is one more layer of leverage. It scares me.

If you back up far enough, it’s possible to be philosophical about anything—the sun is going to blow up eventually, after all.

dinosaurs. If you back up far enough, it’s possible to be philosophical about anything—the sun is going to blow up eventually, after all. But that’s more philosophy than I can manage; for me, and for many others, the loss of this game is the largest conceivable tragedy, if, indeed, we can conceive it.

The army is mustered by the Kochs (the biggest leaseholders in the tar sands) and ConocoPhillips and PetroChina and the rest, and their enemy is all that is wild and holy.

A large-scale study found that, of the 4.4 million children in Delhi, fully half had irreversible lung damage from breathing the air.3 Around the world, pollution kills 9 million people a year, far more than AIDS, malaria, TB, and warfare combined.

But places to put our waste? Those are ever harder to come by, as the increasing temperature weakens the ability of forests and oceans to soak up carbon.

When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide

So, why should you take seriously my fear that the game, in fact, may be starting to play itself out?

no Roman emperor could change the pH of the oceans, but we’ve managed that trick in short order.

Indeed, it’s much farther advanced than most people realize. In 2015, at the Paris climate talks, the world’s governments set a goal of holding temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius and, at the very least, below 2 degrees; by the fall of 2018 the IPCC reported that we might go past that 1.5 degree mark by 2030.

As a team of scientists pointed out recently in Nature, the physical changes we’re currently making by warming the climate will “extend longer than

the entire history of human civilization thus far.”17 And as the Israeli historian and futurist Yuval Harari recently wrote, “Once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end, and a completely new process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend.

everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean.

Carbon Dioxide: They Call It Pollution, We Call It Life.” Another, the Heartland Institute, which Exxon had helped found back in the 1990s, erected billboards comparing climate scientists to famous serial killers

Exxon also signed a $500 billion deal to explore for oil in the Russian Arctic (exploration that was possible only because the area was rapidly melting), and for his billions, Tillerson was officially awarded the Russian Order of Friendship in a ceremony at Vladimir Putin’s villa. No matter the danger posed by fossil fuel, Exxon was never going to let anything change. As Tillerson told his last shareholder meeting, the planet “is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.

Tillerson eventually went to work, of course, as the U.S. secretary of state, and his boss, Donald Trump, was the perfect example of just how well the company’s PR strategy had succeeded. Trump, his news diet centered on the Fox News cable network that the climate deniers had so assiduously cultivated, believed that global warming was a “hoax invented by the Chinese” to cripple American manufacturing. (He further believed that polar ice caps “are at a record level.”)15 As a result, he pulled America out of the Paris climate accords,

fended off shareholder pressure by agreeing to have his executives write a report disclosing the company’s “climate risk.” When that report was released in the winter of 2018, it found that Exxon faced no need to change at all. The team at InsideClimate News, which had broken the original story about Exxon’s lies, summarized the company’s statement: “Exxon insists it would be able to produce all the oil in its existing fields and to keep investing in new reserves.

17 In any event the First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, though in the fall of 2018 the New York attorney general, Barbara Underwood, filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime.

Had we begun cutting global emissions in 1990, we could still have tackled the climate crisis with confidence,” he writes. “The back of the envelope take is that we could then have cut emissions by something on the order of one quarter per decade and kept within our CO2 budget.” It “wouldn’t have been child’s play,” but “well-understood incremental regulatory reforms and well-designed carbon trading or pricing systems” would have done the trick.

The path now is steep as hell—the new curve we’re on demands downright disruptive emissions cuts” of as much as 50 percent a decade. As the geophysicist Michael Mann put it, “what would have been a bunny slope was now a double black diamond.” That means, Steffen explained, that “climate action can no longer be orderly, gradual, or even continuous with our expectations

It’s not big enough. There’s not enough action.

I’ve lived the last thirty years inside that lie, engaged in an endless debate over whether global warming was “real”—a debate in which both sides knew the answer from the beginning. It’s just that one of those sides was willing to lie. And so, we need to understand where that lie came from.

Within days of the UN special rapporteur’s report on extreme American poverty, the U.S. Congress responded by passing a massive tax cut that virtually every economist predicted would make that inequality much worse. As the UN expert noted in his official report to the world body, “The strategy seems to be tailor-made to maximize inequality.… It seems driven by contempt, and sometimes even hatred, for the poor, along with a ‘winner-takes-all’ mentality.