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to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a generation ago. In Canada, where I live, we are in the midst of accepting that our mail can no longer be delivered to our homes.
    The past thirty years have been a steady process of getting less and less in thepublic sphere. This is all defended in the name of austerity, the current justification for these never-ending demands for collective sacrifice. In the past, other words and phrases, equally abstracted from daily life, have served a similar purpose: balanced budgets, increased efficiency, fostering economic growth.
    It seems to me that if humans are capable of sacrificing this much collectivebenefit in the name of stabilizing an economic system that makes daily life so much more expensive and precarious, then surely humans should be capable of making some important lifestyle changes in the interest of stabilizing the physical systems upon which all of life depends. Especially because many of the changes that need to be made to dramatically cut emissions would also materially improve thequality of life for the majority of people on the planet—from allowing kids in Beijing to play outside withoutwearing pollution masks to creating good jobs in clean energy sectors for millions. There seems to be no shortage of both short-term and medium-term incentives to do the right thing for our climate.
    Time is tight, to be sure. But we could commit ourselves, tomorrow, to radically cuttingour fossil fuel emissions and beginning the shift to zero-carbon sources of energy based on renewable technology, with a full-blown transition underway within the decade. We have the tools to do that. And if we did, the seas would still rise and the storms would still come, but we would stand a much greater chance of preventing truly catastrophic warming. Indeed, entire nations could be savedfrom the waves. As Pablo Solón, Bolivia’s former ambassador to the United Nations, puts it: “If I burned your house the least I can do is welcome you into my house . . . and if I’m burning it right now I should try to stop the fire now.” 23
    But we are not stopping the fire. In fact we are dousing it with gasoline. After a rare decline in 2009 due to the financial crisis, global emissions surgedby a whopping 5.9 percent in 2010—the largest absolute increase since the Industrial Revolution. 24
    So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house?
    I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessaryto lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold overour economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectualpower than at any point since the 1920s. Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988—the exact year that marked the dawning of what came to be called “globalization,” with the signing of the agreementrepresenting the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the United States, later to be expanded intothe North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the inclusion of Mexico. 25
    When historians look back on the past quarter