I hear crickets in the summer

“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end.” —William Shakespeare When I was a kid, I spent several summer vacations in the south of France. After entering the country we’d drive to a campground by car, usually arriving early in the morning. By the time we’d pitched our tent, the birds had just started chirping. My parents enjoyed these trips more than me. They like a pleasantly warm summer, whereas I feel most comfortable bundled up during a stern winter. Most days were spent lounging around. My dad, suspended between two trees in a hammock, would read a book. And my mom would make small talk with the vacationers in the trailer- caravan next to us. Meanwhile I hoped my Nintendo could distract me from the heat—at least until we went swimming. That isn’t to say I don’t have plenty of positive memories. Some days we would travel to see a centuries-old town, a candy museum, a vintage bookstore, or a lavender farm—which is how I know that boiling lavender to extract the oils used in soaps and fragrances produces a downright nauseating smell. I liked eating crepes with Nutella, as well as morning breakfast when a local baker would show up in his van to sell fresh baguettes, croissants, and pains au chocolat. One year my grandparents traveled with us in their classic ’70s-era Volkswagen camper. The weary engine showed its age when we drove it up the Mont Ventoux, smoking like Fidel Castro and almost catching on fire. But in the end, it made it up and down the mountain. I still have a picture of my late dog sitting on the summit with my mom, overlooking the endless vista. For me, an inescapable reminder of being away from home was the constant chorus of cicadas during the day, as well as crickets and katydids in the evening. They are not unique to southern France, I know, but because I live farther away from the equator it made their soft cacophony unique to my ears. Their chirping became the soundtrack of vacation. Still today, whenever I hear crickets, I am transported back to France, at least for a moment. Crepes, tents, nougat, and macaroons. It’s therefore been noticeable for me that in the last two years I haven’t needed to travel to hear the gentle shrill chirps at night. I now hear crickets in the summer. For anyone not living in a bubble, the signs of a changing climate are constant. From the obvious rise in the number of severe heat waves, to subtler signs all around us. Indeed, looking up a study of cricket migration, I’ve discovered that in England the Roesel’s bush cricket was first discovered in 1886 around the estuary of the Thames in the south-east of the country, where it mostly remained until the 1990s. In the past 36 years it has moved all the way up to Nottingham in the middle of the country. Over the past 20 years these crickets have migrated more than 50 miles. And this story holds true for other crickets as well. The long-winged conehead cricket was first discovered on England’s southern coast in 1931 and they, too, started migrating north aggressively after the 1990s. These are signs in the wind of an unfolding crisis that eventually will also displace us. Three years ago, I wrote a short piece about climate change for Halloween. It seemed appropriate since it might be the scariest crisis we face. In the article I tried explaining some of the basics of climate science. It was not bad, but it could be better. My writing style has improved since then, my prose a tad more refined and confident, and my knowledge has deepened, so I want another bite at the apple. Therefore, we will again discuss some climate science 101. It’s desperately needed, too, considering the taboo of mentioning it in the news. In 2019, a Media Matters study found that climate change segments accounted for just 0.7 percent of all news broadcasts—depressingly it was actually a 68 percent increase from 2018. While there was a slight bump in coverage around 2021, the downward trend has continued. Earlier this year, Media Matters reported that “Climate coverage in 2025 declined by 35% compared to 2024 … This marks a continued decline from the banner years of 2021 and 2022, when coverage exceeded 1300 minutes.” Their research found that in 2025 the news media collectively aired 201 segments on the topic but only mentioned fossil fuels in 16 segments—just 8 percent. Furthermore, only 7 climate scientists appeared on the news all year. Another study from earlier this year by the media monitor Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting—or FAIR—found similar results for online newspapers. “In 2021, 2.4% of US online news pieces … contained the phrase ‘climate change.’ In 2025, that percentage was 1.3%, which is a nearly 46% decrease. This trend continues in 2026. Between January 1 and March 31 2026, climate stories made up 1.1% of online news coverage. That’s a 42% decrease compared to the same period in 2021, when climate stories made up 1.9% of coverage.” Another report by FAIR from last June documented how aggressively the media try and avoid the topic. Here is just one example: In London, NBC’s Danielle Hamamdjian reported record highs in the city on Tuesday, with even higher temperatures expected to come. The broadcast then cut to a clip of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres saying, “And today this city—and far beyond—are experiencing the hottest day of the year—with higher temperatures to come.” The event that he was speaking at—London Climate Action Week—was not identified. In fact, a banner with the London Climate Action Week logo that was behind Guterres was cropped out of the shot. The soundbite NBC featured was excised from Guterres’ longer remarks about the severity of climate change and the critical necessity of quickly and justly transitioning from fossil fuels: “We have just lived through the 11 hottest years ever recorded. And today this city—and far beyond—are experiencing the hottest day of the year—with higher temperatures to come. London isn’t just calling—it’s cooking. Around the world, climate disasters are becoming more frequent, more destructive and more costly. And the World Meteorological Organization has warned we ain’t seen noting yet. El Niño is not just knocking on the door. It risks blowing the house down. Turning up the heat. Disrupting food and water systems. And hitting the vulnerable the hardest. Ten years ago, world leaders agreed in Paris to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Now scientists say average annual temperatures will exceed that threshold in the coming years.” Later in the speech, Guterres demanded that AI companies publicly disclose their energy usage and commit to powering AI data centers with renewables by 2030. From a speech entirely about climate change and its tangible impacts, NBC Nightly News managed to cherrypick a soundbite of Guterres essentially saying nothing more than “It’s hot.” While the segment linked together these extreme weather events in Europe and the US as a global phenomenon, climate change doesn’t even get a passing mention. I used to naïvely think that people would care once they started dying, but I’ve been disabused of that notion. During last year’s deadly wildfires in California—which were the most destructive in the state’s history—Google searches for “wildfire” increased by 2,400 percent but queries for “climate change” actually decreased, not just nationwide but also in California. It seems that for most people, the preferred response to climate change is sticking their heads in the sand, even as it turns to glass. For most people, climate science seems like an intricate enigma of predictive models and esoteric data. Since they believe the science is beyond simple understanding, they resort to either trusting or distrusting the scientists. But the basics are not that convoluted. That’s why I started my previous article by mentioning Eunice Foote, the first scientist to explain how our atmosphere traps heat. The fact that our atmosphere does trap heat is simple enough to observe. We know that space is freezing cold, and the higher you scale a mountain, where the atmosphere is thinner, the temperature drops; some mountains even retain snowy peaks during the summer. Plus, you know that after the sun goes down it takes a while for the air to cool. Simple enough. Historically, scientists also understood this, based on the same observations I just made. But how does our planet’s atmosphere trap heat? That was the tricky question. In 1856, Foote did an experiment. Our atmosphere is made up of many gases (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, helium, water vapor, etc.), Foote took two of them, oxygen and carbon dioxide, and put them in two separate glass cylinders along with thermometers. Then she placed them in the sun. She published her findings in the American Journal of Science and Arts: The receiver containing the [carbon dioxide] gas became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed [from the sun], it was many times as long in cooling. An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature … must have necessarily resulted. It’s that simple. Some gases trap more heat from the sun than others. If more of those gases enter our atmosphere—or the percentage of “cooler” gases drops—the Earth’s climate will get hotter. These gases that trap heat are called “greenhouse gases.” But you might still be wondering why they absorb more heat. What differentiates regular gases from greenhouse gases? The answer: their molecular structure. Here is how heat works: when the molecules in a substance “vibrate” or “jitter,” it’s hot. The faster they vibrate, the hotter the substance is. Conversely, slow-moving molecules means something is cool. If you’ve ever heard a physicist say, “heat is motion,” now you know what it means. When you touch something that’s hot, like a coffee mug, the heat doesn’t technically get into your hand. Rather, the molecules in your hand are getting bumped by the vibrating molecules in the mug, thus warming your hand. And in turn, the bouncing molecules in the mug are slowing down, due to hitting your hand’s molecules like a speed bump. Different things have differently structured molecules, and some of them are quicker to vibrate than others. It’s not a terribly difficult prediction, then, that increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide or methane, will heat up our climate. Since our planet’s climate is an interconnected patchwork of ecosystems, heating our atmosphere will affect those other spheres—such as the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, or the biosphere—and the various systems contained within them. In short, our climate will change. The difficulty lies in predicting these short-term changes. The reason that Scandinavia has warm summers is because of jet streams and ocean currents that transfer heat from the tropics to northern Europe. But because wind is caused by temperature (hot air rises and cool air pools), it’s difficult to predict how a hotter atmosphere or warmer ocean is going to disrupt existing wind patterns. If Scandinavia stops receiving warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, it could become much colder, triggering a mini ice age in Europe. That’s why we speak of climate change and not simply of global warming, however in the long run the earth is still heating up. A reasonable follow up question would be, what would that mean for us? Many climate change skeptics have pivoted in recent years, as the fact that the climate is changing has become harder to ignore and disbelieve, to arguing that climate change won’t be so bad for us. After all, they argue, the climate has always changed, we’ll just have to accept it and live with it. But unfortunately, accepting it and living with it can’t be done at the same time. It’s actually not terribly difficult to predict what a greenhouse Earth would look like because for the majority of our planet’s history that’s been the default state. What the Earth is in currently is called an icehouse state, meaning there is permanent snow on the two poles. (Geologists call this an ice age.) During an icehouse period, the frozen poles expand and contract over millions of years, resulting in what are called glacial periods and interglacial periods. What you know as the Ice Age was our last glacial period. We are currently in an interglacial period known as the Holocene. While icehouse periods last for millions of years, our Earth is over four billion years old and icehouse periods account for only 25 percent of our planet’s history. Source: Wikipedia Our current and ongoing ice age (icehouse period) began 34 million years ago. Human beings—Homo sapiens—have only been around 315,000 years. Our cousins that share the genus Homo, like the Neanderthals, date back 2.8 million years. Even accounting for the entire hominin lineage—the branch of primates that split from Chimpanzees—it only dates back 7 million years. All of us developed during this current ice age. It is all we have ever known. We are not meant for a greenhouse (or God forbid a hothouse!) Earth. But that is where we are now going. We are ending our ice age and with it a climate that can sustain our species. If we had more time, we could develop research and technology to either extend our ice age or somehow develop infrastructure for us to survive on a hostile climate; kind of like some people envisage us doing on Mars someday. Similarly, in the long run we will someday need to develop techniques of keeping our star alive or migrating to a different planetary system, but those questions will be moot if we wipe ourselves out before we even get to those crossroads! Sure, humanity will most likely have an end date. Although I’d like to imagine we could make an eternal presence in the universe, it’s unclear if the universe itself has an end date or not. But how embarrassing it would be to destroy ourselves for no apparent reason, by letting a crisis that we understand—and have the means to fix!—fester until it is too late. Is this how the human story ends? If so, that would be humiliating. There have already been five mass extinction events on this Earth. About 201 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic period, a massive spike of greenhouse gases (likely starting with carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions, which then led to the melting of permafrost and the release of methane trapped therein) led to rising sea levels and climate change that wiped out 76 percent of all life on the planet. Mostly wiping out mammals, clearing the way for the dominant age of the dinosaurs. That was the fourth mass extinction event. Roughly 135 million years later, a meteor the size of a small town hit modern-day Mexico. A combination of pulverized rock dust, sulfur aerosols from vaporized minerals, and soot from wildfires that resulted from the impact, polluted the atmosphere to the point that it blotted out the sun worldwide. That caused a catastrophic disruption to the food chain. Plants died out because they need sunlight to power their metabolism; that meant that herbivorous dinosaurs had nothing to eat and they slowly starved out; and that meant that carnivorous dinosaurs no longer had prey to hunt. Some of the avian dinosaurs died out because of the cold, while those with feathers survived. And the bigger ones with teeth went extinct because their prey also died out. The smaller ones with beaks survived because they could live on a foraged diet and open small nuts, seeds, or mollusks. And that, boys, girls, and enbies, is how birds evolved. As anyone who has seen Jurassic Park knows, birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs. Some scientists worry that we are already in the sixth mass extinction event, though it’s kind of hard to know for certain; think of it as Schroedinger’s apocalypse. Due to our heating of the planet by burning fossil fuels, more and more species are dying out. In fact, according to some studies, the pace at which species are going extinct is 1,000 to 10,000 percent higher than the natural rate of extinction. Remember, it starts with the coral, kelp, and bees, and it ends with us. What makes the putative sixth mass extinction event unique is that, unlike the other five, this one isn’t a natural disaster—like a meteor impact or volcanic eruptions. This one is man-made. Or, to use a fancy Greek-influenced word, anthropogenic. What, then, is to be done? How do we avoid catastrophe? Before answering that question, it’s worth pointing out that for many people the consequences of climate change are already here and can no longer be avoided. Last August’s devastating floods that struck Nepal and Tibet are illustrative of this point. The floods were triggered by melting permafrost on the Himalayan mountains. A massive glacier collapsed and crashed hard enough to register as an earthquake on seismographs. The ensuing landslide of sediment, rock, and water caused a flood that—as of writing—has killed over 1,440 people, with over 5,650 people still missing, and over 8,317 homes, seven hospitals, and thirty cultural sites destroyed. Meanwhile, in Europe, during last summer’s unprecedented heatwaves, The Guardian reported, “At least 35,000 more people died during Europe’s four record- breaking, back-to-back heatwaves this summer than would normally be expected, according to incomplete figures from barely half the continent. “Excess mortality in three of the EU’s larger countries—Germany, France and Spain—alone has already exceeded 25,000, according to the provincial national figures, and experts say the toll will rise significantly once August totals are consolidated.” According to the World Health Organization, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year,” from heatwaves, the spread of infectious diseases carried by migrating insects, and food shortages due to aridification. Another report published in the 2025 edition of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change is even more dire. It was written by 128 experts from over 70 academic institutions, led by University College London in collaboration with the World Health Organization, and was the biggest study of its kind. The report found that one person dies every minute from the combined effects of the heating climate. “We’re seeing millions of deaths occurring needlessly every year because of our delay in mitigating climate change,” Dr. Marina Romanello, the study’s lead author, said. “If we keep on financing fossil fuels and enabling this expansion of fossil fuels, we know that a healthy future is not possible.” Additionally, there are also subtler human costs. In the Global South, for instance, there is currently an epidemic of kidney disease among blue-collar workers. Climate journalist Jeff Goodell wrote in his book, The Heat Will Kill You First: In addition to the immediate risks of heat exposure such as heatstroke, there can be serious long-term health consequences. In El Salvador and Costa Rica, an epidemic of chronic kidney disease has hit farmworkers who work in hot sugarcane fields—twenty thousand workers have died since 2002 and thousands of others have had to go on dialysis to survive. The disease has been rising among workers in hot climates around the world, including Florida and California. An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine predicts that chronic kidney disease “is likely to be just one of many heat-sensitive illnesses that will be unmasked and accelerated by climate change.” Last year, Yale Environment 360 magazine published an article titled “Heat Stress Is a Major Driver of India’s Kidney Disease Epidemic” that also reported on this phenomenon: Arumugam, a 64-year-old laborer from Villipakam village, sits cross-legged on his neighbor’s porch, clutching a thick booklet. Flipping through his medical records, he laments how much of his life has changed since he was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease of unknown origin (CKDu) and put on dialysis six years ago. Like nearly everyone in his village in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Arumugam started working in a salt pan in his early teens. Standing ankle-deep in salt crystals and brine, he raked salt under the blistering sun for hours at a time, in temperatures that often reached 104 degrees F (40 degrees C). With no place or time to rest and drink water, he often felt dizzy, breathless, and fatigued. His hands and feet swelled, but, reluctant to lose his daily wage, he put off consulting a doctor until urinating became painful. Now he spends four hours, every week, undergoing treatment. The cost of those sessions, $17 each, he says, has placed an immense financial burden on his family, which is now trapped in debt. An epidemic of CKDu—a designation that indicates the disease is not linked with known precursors like high blood pressure or diabetes—began to emerge more than 20 years ago among agricultural laborers in Central America and Sri Lanka and is now present in more than 35 countries, including India, where the disease is becoming increasingly common among outdoor workers in rural areas. … Experts warn that rising temperatures linked to climate change are increasing outdoor workers’ exposure to excessive heat, high humidity, and dehydration—factors that are linked with acute kidney injury, which diminishes the organ’s ability to filter waste products from blood. Left untreated, kidney injury can lead to a range of health complications—including pericarditis and pulmonary embolism—that can be fatal. Doctors in Tamil Nadu are increasingly reporting kidney issues in men in their 30s and 40s who work long hours outdoors, mostly farming or working in sanitation or construction. The trend was highlighted last year, after the state health department, with Madras Medical College, offered urine dipstick tests to 5.7 million people. More than half of those with confirmed CKD had no history of diabetes or hypertension. While climate change will impact everyone, the costs will be borne primarily by the vulnerable. In essence, climate change will worsen existing systems of exploitation. Most obvious is the Global South, situated nearer the equator, and utterly immiserated by years of colonial exploitation. They will face the worst catastrophes without the technology or infrastructure to manage the worsening crises. This is especially egregious considering that the main polluters are the colonial powers—the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia. Those countries have approximately one tenth of the global population and yet account for more than half of global emissions. The United States alone, according to the US Department of Energy, has emitted more CO2 than the entire European Union, twice as much as China, and eight times more than India since 1750. But, like a Sophoclean tragedy wherein the innocent suffer for the sins of others, the island nation of Tuvalu, a two-thousand-year-old society in Polynesia, is likely going to disappear by the end of this century due to sea level rise. “As the physical reality of the nation slips beneath the ocean, the government is building a digital copy of the country,” writes journalist Sophie Yeo, “backing up everything from its houses to its beaches to its trees. It hopes this virtual replica will preserve the nation’s beauty and culture—as well as the legal rights of its 11,000 citizens—for generations to come.” The initiative, first announced by Tuvalu’s minister of foreign affairs in 2022, will one day serve as a kind of grim black box for future Tuvaluan generations spread across the world, allowing them to see the place where their culture was born. A culture which they’ll carry with them in a knapsack, without ever being able to live in it. For rest of us it will be a library of shame; a reminder of what the world lost. Then there are other dimensions to the climate crisis, like gender. Women are disproportionately victimized by climate change. According to UN figures, 80 percent of people displaced by climate change so far have been women. Asako Okai, director of the UN Development Programme’s Crisis Bureau, wrote in an essay, “The statistics are staggering; when disaster strikes, women and children are 14 times more likely than men to die. Let us use a real example: of the 230,000 people killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 70 percent were women.” The reason is that women makeup the majority of the world’s poor and often lack access to healthcare or other social services. Half the countries of the world still deny women equal property rights. The anti-poverty advocacy group Global Citizen wrote: When droughts and extreme temperatures dry up sources of water, women have to travel longer distances to collect water for cooking, cleaning, and managing gardens. As a result, they have less time to pursue other sources of income, which prevents them from becoming economically independent. Stephanie Buechler studies the intersection of water scarcity and women’s rights along the US-Mexico border at the University of Arizona. She found that decreasing water availability reduced women’s ability to invest in their careers. Women in Sonora, Mexico, who make cheese to sell for additional income, have had a harder time acquiring milk because livestock owners replaced cows that needed a lot of water with cows that need less. The new cows produce less milk. “The women had less immediate access to milk, so they had to go further afield to a community about an hour away that still had more groundwater than they did,” she said. “In terms of the cheese, it’s basically a live culture, and it can die in extreme temperatures.” With less water available, women who rely on community gardens and farmers’ markets are less able to cultivate and process produce. They’re also spending more on water and energy bills. Sources of clean drinking water are disappearing in other ways that harm women. In Senegal, for instance, women have had to travel farther distances to retrieve water for everyday use, which limits their ability to be independent farmers. Meanwhile, with the decline of fish populations, women in fishing communities have had their income disappear, forcing them to turn, in some cases, to sell sex in exchange for food. Cate Owen, member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, wrote: “Women are trading sex for access to fish, access to markets, access to livelihood. It is that negotiation of power, and negotiation of access to natural resources in unequal structures, that makes gender-based violence a tool.” Even other forms of gender oppression are exacerbated by climate change. An Australian study found that massive climate disasters such as wildfires increase rates of domestic violence. By increasing the stress placed on families, already abusive relationships deteriorate even further. A 2022 UN report also found an increase in child marriages following climate disasters: Child marriage, which is considered an act of gender-based violence, has been observed in various communities as a means of coping in the event of disaster, according to the submissions. In Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Kenya, for example, child marriage is a way to secure funds or assets and recover losses experienced due to climate-related disasters, such as drought, repeated flooding and more intense storms. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, easily one of the nastiest terror groups in the world, targets women who have been displaced by drought—an increasing scourge due to hotter temperatures as well as changes in rainfall patterns. The group uses women as sex- slaves and often as disposable fodder during conflicts; sixty percent of the group’s suicide bombers have been women. Of course, in our capitalist world, there is another distinct group of disempowered people that will suffer disproportionately: the working class. Quoting again from Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First: Somebody still has to build houses, grow food, fix roads, deliver your packages. In the US, fifteen million people have jobs in which they spend at least part of the time outdoors. For them, as well as for warehouse and factory workers who labor in poorly designed buildings, heat is a workplace hazard they confront on a daily basis. And it takes a toll. During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, Kenton Scott Krupp, fifty-one, was found dead at an Oregon Walmart warehouse. Temperatures had reached 97 degrees [Fahrenheit (36 °C)] the day he died, and his coworkers saw him stumbling and struggling to speak. In Hillsboro, Oregon, a roofer died after collapsing from heat stress on the job. Postal workers and delivery drivers are particularly at risk, in part because their delivery vehicles often aren’t air-conditioned and heat up like convection ovens. In 2021, Jose Cruz Rodriguez Jr., a twenty-three-year-old UPS driver, was found dead in the company’s parking lot in Waco, Texas, just days after starting the job. In 2022, twenty-four-year-old UPS driver Esteban David Chavez Jr. died while delivering packages in California. Another UPS driver was captured on video stumbling and collapsing outside a home in Arizona. “People are dropping like flies out here,” one UPS driver told the New York Times. “It’s very brutal.” UPS workers shared photographs on social media with thermometer readings of 150 degrees [F (65 °C)] in the back of their trucks. …And when it’s hot, workers make more mistakes and are injured more often. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that even a modest increase in temperature led to twenty thousand additional injuries per year in the state, with a social cost of $1 billion. When it’s hot, workers need more breaks, their cognitive skills slow down, equipment fails. Another study found that worker productivity losses from extreme heat in the US totaled $100 billion in 2020 and could grow to $500 billion by 2050. Worldwide, the economic impacts will be felt most powerfully in the Global South. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, for example, which has a labor-intensive economy and where few workers have air-conditioning, heat and humidity already cause productivity losses of about $6 billion each year. The people who take the hit, as always, are those who can least afford it: sidewalk vendors, garment industry workers, and brickmakers who tend the thousands of hot, soot- belching brick kilns in the city. The response from the ruling class to this slowdown of economic growth has been predictable. In Texas, the state where historically most workers die from heat exposure, Republicans passed a law in 2023 that allowed corporations to deny water breaks for outdoor workers. “The law will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin in 2010 and Dallas in 2015 that established 10-minute breaks every four hours so that construction workers can drink water and protect themselves from the sun,” the Texas Tribune reported. “It also prevents other cities from passing such rules in the future.” “Labor unions and workers’ rights advocates opposed the law, while business organizations supported it, including the National Federation of Independent Business, a lobbying group with more than 20,000 members in Texas,” the paper added. “[Governor] Abbott said it would ‘provide a new hope to Texas businesses struggling under burdensome local regulations.’” Returning now to our earlier question, we can see that for many there is no such thing as “preventing” climate change. The crisis is already here, it is currently costing lives and causing suffering. So the actual question is how do we mitigate the climate crisis and prevent it from wiping out our species? The technical, scientific answer is not complicated: stop using fossil fuels. If we stop polluting our atmosphere with greenhouse gases, we stop causing climate change. That is the crux of the issue. Either we’ll go back to using horse-drawn carriages or use renewably- generated electric cars, otherwise we have no future. Luckily, modern advancements in technology have made the prospect of generating enough clean energy to sustain our current usage possible. You might be surprised to learn that this solution isn’t just simple in theory, but could also be implemented with relative ease. A 2019 report from the International Energy Agency found that offshore wind farms—windmills build in the sea—have the capacity to generate more than eighteen times the global electricity demand. This is not a sci-fi pipe dream, it could be accomplished with currently existing technology. Pair that with other clean energy sources such as solar panels, which have pretty much the same generative capacity as wind farms, and the world could easily be powered by clean energy. The task of building out this clean energy infrastructure is also more than feasible. Our societies have undertaken far more challenging and ambitious infrastructure projects in the past (such as building our current fossil-fuel reliant power grid). So what exactly is preventing us from carrying out these solutions? Here I would like to point to two forces: state power on the one hand—more specifically, imperialist  state power—and capitalism on the other. Let’s deal, first of all, with capitalism and its connection with state power, before adding the imperialist element. The most commonly accepted definition of a state comes from the German sociologist Max Weber: “A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Explaining further, he added: “Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extend to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. … Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by the means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence.” It is by using this violence that the state, in capitalist societies, imposes the capitalist mode of production, and funnels resource distribution through markets. To put the problem into perspective, consider that the United States has a food surplus, meaning that it produces more food than its population consumes, but according to the latest Household Food Insecurity report from the USDA, published last December, 47.9 million Americans live in food-insecure households, including 14.1 million children. According to ReFED, a non-profit studying food waste in the US, about 73.9 million tonnes of food produced in 2025—over 30 percent of total food produced—was labeled “surplus” food, meaning it went unsold and uneaten. Only 2 percent of that surplus was donated to food banks, 9 percent became livestock feed, and 85 percent went to waste destinations (i.e. landfills, incinerators, compost heaps, etc.). The solution to hunger is simple. Give the hungry the food that is now shipped to landfills. Why doesn’t that happen? Because under capitalism, basic human needs are commodified and only provided to those who sell themselves on the labor market. For-profit agribusiness won’t give food away for free or at uncompetitive market prices, and poor people can’t take it because state institutions—the police and the courts—will punish them for “theft” if they do. This problem generalizes. Take homelessness, for example. There are more empty houses in the United States than homeless people. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there were about 771,480 homeless Americans in 2024. And according to the US Census Bureau, there are approximately 14 million vacant housing units. That means that there are about 18 vacant homes for every single homeless person. The solution, again, is simple: put people who don’t have houses in the empty ones! Why doesn’t it happen? Because if someone were to do that, the capitalists looking to profit from those houses would call the police and have the person forcibly kicked out. The state will only allow resources (like housing and food) to be distributed through the capitalist system, and the same goes for energy. Even though the technology exists to transition to clean energy, the state won’t allow it because it can’t be done within capitalism. So how does capitalism hamper clean energy production? Well, there are several reasons why private industry can’t make as much profit from clean energy as they can from dirty energy. Mainly because clean energy is renewable, whist dirty energy is inefficient. The reason that suburbs became so ubiquitous in the US is because the fossil fuel industry lobbied the government to design neighborhoods in such a way as to maximize energy inefficiency (and therefore profit). If neighborhoods could generate their own electricity there would no longer be rising profits for energy companies—the whole point of capitalism! After all, the word capital refers to money that’s “spent”—or more accurately, advanced—with the intention of getting an increased sum of money back in return. Furthermore, Western governments also heavily subsidize the fossil fuel industries, despite the fact it already generates over $2 billion in profit every day. The US gives more tax dollars to fossil fuel companies than it spends on the Department of Education. That’s another reason why fossil fuels are so lucrative for private investors. In comparison, the paltry sums Western governments spend to nudge investors towards green energy projects is often the only selling point. Writing for Time  magazine, Brett Christophers, in a piece headlined “Capitalism Can’t Solve Climate Change,” explained, The core issue here is easy to state. Most countries are relying predominantly on the private sector to drive faster renewables investment; private firms invest on the basis of expected profits; but profitability in renewables is rarely attractive. … Western governments’ renewables subsidies rarely occasion strong profits. More commonly, they allow just about sufficient profit to keep the sector afloat. Noting that his own firm, Berkshire Hathaway, received tax credits when building wind farms, Warren Buffet once conceded: “That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” The ongoing necessity of subsidy for renewables development is evidenced by what happens when subsidies are withdrawn or even just substantively reduced. As occurred for instance in the UK’s onshore wind sector in 2018 and Vietnam’s solar sector in 2021, investment collapses. When Rex Tillerson was asked in 2015, when he was the CEO of Exxon, why the company didn’t invest in renewables, he replied, “we choose not to loose money on purpose.” By contrast, China is by far the world’s leading producer of renewable energy, and it’s no coincidence that it’s run by the Communist Party of China which has build up a large public sector to compete with a highly regulated capitalist sector. This hybrid economy has enabled China to pursue goals for the public interest, irrespective of profit. As Christophers notes in his piece, “Nine of the country’s top 10 wind developers are owned by the government, and such state-owned players control in excess of 95 percent of the market. … Add to this the fact that the banks financing all the new renewables development in China are generally also state-owned and directed, and a stark reality comes into focus.” China now generates more electricity than its power grid can absorb. In the first six months of this year, they generated a surplus of electricity big enough to power Mexico for a whole year. And yet, capitalist industry remains uninterested in utilizing it or building the requisite infrastructure to use that generative capacity. Adam Tooze wrote a piece for the Financial Times headlined “Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness”: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has roiled energy markets. Consumers are calling out for alternatives to unreliable fossil fuels. And yet we are in a world of surplus solar panels. Let that sink in. … For the past half century, research labs around the world, starting in the 1970s with Nasa spin-offs and the big US energy research push under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach this point. Together with batteries, which are also rapidly approaching the point of excess supply, they are the key to a sustainable future. … But mark 2026 as the moment when the world found itself with “more than enough” solar panels and we shrugged. It’s not as if these capitalists are all stupid. Many of them realize perfectly well that continuing down the present course will lead to catastrophe. But they are either too fanatically pro-capitalist or simply don’t care about the consequences. A couple of years ago, the head of responsible investment at HSBC bank, Stuart Kirk, said that “investors should not care about climate risk.” Adding, “At a big bank like ours, what do people think the average loan length is? It is six years. What happens to the planet in year seven is actually irrelevant to our loan book. … Who cares if Miami is six metres underwater in 100 years?” There is much more to say about the effects of capitalism on the environment and the body politic—you’d only need to find a sufficiently erudite Marxist who’d gladly explain it to you in more detail—but for now this rough sketch will suffice. So what is the imperialist element? It’s particularly important to understand the United States. After the Second World War, the imperialist interests of the United States expanded dramatically. Before the First World War, the US had been one of a number of empires competing for world control. The big one was Britain, followed by the Germans, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Russians, the Austro-Hungarians and the Japanese. When the dust of the “Great War” cleared, the United States was the only major power that emerged from the carnage unscathed. In fact, it was even more powerful than before because American banks had funded the British and French war machines, and those two countries now owed huge debts to the United States. (This was why they imposed reparations on their defeated opponent, Germany, at the fateful Treaty of Versailles.) But it was only during the Second World War that American planners began imagining a new world order. The Council on Foreign Relations, arguably Washington’s most important foreign policy think-tank, drew up detailed plans for the post-war world. One council member explained that “The United States must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a Pax Americana.” Another document outlines the need “to secure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by foreign nations,” in order to construct a world in which the United States holds “unquestioned power.” The key to this power was to control the “prime sources of raw material” that are “strategically necessary for world control.” That meant, chiefly, oil. The strategy was twofold, the US would have to control the world’s resources—mainly energy resources—and, secondly, make other countries dependent on them. The planners were mostly thinking of Japan and Western Europe—historically the competitors of the US Empire. George Kennan, probably the most influential high-level State Department planner in that organization’s history, author of America’s famous “containment” strategy during the Cold War, wrote of Japan: “If we in the Western world could work out controls … adept enough … to have power over what Japan imports in the way of oil and such other things as she has got to get from overseas, we would have veto power on what she does in the military and industrial field.” One of Franklin Roosevelt’s advisors, Adolf Berle, once remarked that “control of the Middle East has usually meant substantial control of the world.” “This is not merely sentimental,” he added, “cutting of the oil supply from the Persian Gulf cripples, if it does not prevent, naval forces in the Indian Ocean and isolates India. It also gives an absolute free run to the east coast of Africa and, of course, make it possible to close the Strait of Aden.” A State Department memo from 1945 also pointed to the importance of controlling Middle East oil: “Saudi Arabia, where the oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power,” the document said, was “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Navy Secretary James Forrestal similarly remarked, “I don’t care which company or companies develop the Saudi reserves, but I think most emphatically that it should be American.” The first step of the plan was accomplished partly by taking over the British Empire, kicking out the French, and supporting dictatorships in the Middle East that would allow the United States access to the oil resources in return for a steady flow of military, financial, and diplomatic aid. (The French were defenestrated on the basis that they were captured by Nazi Germany, therefore part of the Axis alliance, and therefore not entitled to keep their overseas territory—at least not the ones that contained oil.) This part of the story, especially the support, and sometimes even installments via coups d’état, of Middle Eastern dictatorships will be familiar to those of you who study American history in the Middle East.  It should be noted that the United States had more than enough energy from its own oil wells and from its Latin American colonies; the desire to control global oil supply-lines was motivated purely by imperial interests. The second part of the plan, making other countries dependent on US-controlled energy, was accomplished during the reconstruction from WWII. In Europe this took the form of the Marshall Plan. Before the war, 90 percent of European energy came from coal, since that’s what Europe had access to. When the US reconstructed Europe and Japan, they ensured those societies would be oil dependent. Even today, one cannot understand Trump’s reign of terror in Latin America without grasping the strategic importance of oil. The kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and first lady was transparently about oil. Trump didn’t even hide the reason for attacking Caracas. The seizing of Venezuela’s oil fields, the largest concentration of crude oil in the world, allowed the United States to do two things. Firstly, while it didn’t insulate the United States from rising oil prices, it did provide Washington with an oil source closer to home and, crucially, farther away from the Middle East. Despite the Iran War not going as swimmingly as Trump had anticipated, the United States has suffered minimally, in part because even as the Houthis recently blew up Saudi Arabia’s oil pipeline, shutting off Riyadh’s workaround amid the Hormuz closure, the US is not in danger of running out of oil like Cuba is. That brings us to the second opportunity Washington created by its Venezuela attack. They could now starve out Cuba. Less than a month after the Venezuela operation, Washington tightened the unlawful embargo on Cuba by threatening to tariff anyone who sold oil to the island—a move mostly directed against Mexico. Havana thus lost its two biggest energy suppliers and quickly ran out of fuel, causing island-wide blackouts. Food stopped being delivered, gas wasn’t available to cook, and hospitals had to cancel surgeries and dialysis appointments. Today, the island is still suffering immensely but they have done what they’ve learned to do throughout the Cold War: adept. According to the New York Times: “[Cubans] are swapping their gas-guzzling 1950s American cars for electric motorcycles and rickshaws from China; importing hefty lithium batteries to keep televisions and fans running through blackouts; jury-rigging generators to run on more accessible natural gas; and installing solar panels on rooftops and even vehicles.” The solar panels are also from China. “Together, the workarounds amount to a new Cuban energy grid—this one more in the hands of the Cuban people, propping up society with the electricity off and fuel lines dry.” This is perfectly illustrative of why the US government hates renewables. Case in point, the Times journalists added: “For months, President Trump has been predicting that Cuba is about to collapse. ‘It’s just going to fall,’ he told reporters on Jan. 4, a day after taking control of Venezuela’s oil, which had been Cuba’s lifeline. … [But] Cuba has lasted far longer without fuel shipments than the Trump administration appears to have expected. … it seems that Mr. Trump, like many US presidents before him, is also finding that toppling the government founded by Fidel Castro is not so simple.” In conclusion, in order to save us—if nothing else—from climate change, it requires us to deal with the twin evils of capitalism and imperialist state power. If we can’t make the effort to solve these issues in time, then our long-term survival becomes a question mark. In July of last year, renowned Canadian scientist and long-time environmentalist David Suzuki, then 89 years old, gave an interview to iPolitics, headlined “‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost”: Public concern in the late 1980s was right at the top and we had the first international conference on the atmosphere in 1988, where there were 300 people, over 40 governments, environmentalists, scientists, private sector people, you name it. At the end of that conference, they said global warming represented a threat to humanity, second only to global nuclear war. If the world had followed the conclusions from that conference, we would not have the problem we face today and we would have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives. Now, it’s too late. I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc. There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them—the ozone layer—and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockström says we have five years to get out of the danger zone. If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven! And, if you look at those boundaries, like the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve had 28 COP meetings on climate change and we haven’t been able to cap emissions. We’re on our way to more than a three-degree temperature rise by the end of this century, and scientists agree we shouldn’t rise above one and a half degrees. … “You’ve been quoted many times over the last couple decades saying it’s not too late to tackle climate change, so when did you come to this realization that the battle it lost?” It’s been coming all along. We had previously said that the choice with climate change was mitigation and adaptation, and people began saying 20 years ago that we had to talk about adaptation. Other people said we can’t talk about adaptation because that acknowledges that climate change is real and impacting people. Well, we’re way past the time when we should have been thinking about adaptation. Look, I’m not giving up in the sense of not doing anything, but Trump’s election was the dagger in my heart. Trump’s win was the triumph of capitalism and neoliberalism, and he’s going to wreak havoc. There’s nothing we can do about that, except maybe incremental changes. That’s not what we need. We need revolution. Can you have a peaceful revolution? I don’t know. But I’m saying, as an environmentalist, we have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems. … the economy itself is driving us into the ditch. It’s based on the creed of cancer—steady growth—and you can’t have endless growth in a finite world. The global economy is far too big, it’s got to shrink, and it’s got to be distributed more equitably around the world. It’s crazy that we celebrate people who are billionaires. It should be illegal for Christ’s sake. It’s got nothing to do with money, and everything to do with how big their dick is. We should have awards and whenever someone achieves $100 million, which is already obscene, we give them a bronze statue of a dick … For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together. Finland is offering a great example because the Finnish government has sent a letter to all of their citizens warning of future emergencies, whether they’re earthquakes, floods, droughts, or storms. They’re going to come and they’re going to be more urgent and prolonged. Governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies, so Finland is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front line of whatever hits and better be sure you’re ready to meet it. Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has fire extinguishers? Where is the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the routes of escape. You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now. There’s one more passage I’d like to leave you with. I frequently read Elie Mystal’s newsletter—he’s the justice correspondent for The Nation. Earlier this month, as I was already working on this piece, he offered some somber but poignant reflections: My youngest child is about to start middle school. The kid makes his own breakfast now and beats me at video games. When my oldest child hit middle school it was thrilling and exciting, but now that my youngest is at that stage I’m gripped with a little bit of “wait… why are things moving so fast?” The younger one is my “outdoorsy” kid, and this summer he’s really forced me to think a lot about the destruction of the natural world and the uninhabitable planet we’re leaving to him. I’m used to thinking of climate change as a political problem, and a legal problem, but I think watching my kid experience things we both know won’t won’t be there for his children really brings home the apocalyptic nature of our failure to do fuck-all to stop the climate crisis. I used to think about the great historical tragedies of lost knowledge, like the burning of the library at Alexandria, with a sense of “how could those people let that happen?” Now, I know how. Another parent, my editor, happened to overhear her own son talking to a friend recently about all the crazy stories his grandparents had from their childhoods that he could never imagine. He’s an outdoorsy kid too, loves the natural world. When she asked him about the stories he thought he’d have to tell his children, he smooth-called, “I’ll tell them about all the animals we got to see that no longer exist.” The line gutted me. Not just because it’s true, but because her kid (and my kid) knows it’s true. They know we’re living in a time of great loss. They know their parents’ generation has failed them. Live well my friends. Enjoy the world while it’s here and while we’re part of it. Despite all the ugliness, I still deeply love this self-destructive species (even if I despise many members of it). So please act with urgency, or kiss each other goodbye. With peace and love, from a dying world.