fossil fuel financing

People often ask me why I give away this newsletter for free. After explaining that I’m able to because some kind people take out a voluntary subscription, I give the noble answer: This is the most important topic on Earth, and so people need to know about it. The less noble answer is, sometimes I wonder if I’m really able to capture what’s going on, or if there are simply too many moving parts for anyone (me anyway) to write coherently about “climate change.”

That’s because it’s simultaneously the most important scientific story on the planet (in terms of physics and chemistry, but also everything from meteorology and agriculture to public health) with the largest imaginable economic effects, which should mean (but doesn’t) that it should dominate our political life. Understanding how those three spheres interact means trying to figure out everything from human psychology to geopolitics, and much in between. So I thought I’d try to give just a tiny sense this week of how, even in the course of a few days time, all these things bump up against each other.