TRULY, WE HAVE FUCKED IT UP in so many ways! Yet while climate change increasingly feels like an inescapable doom upon humanity, our only means of recourse remains political. Even under the heavy weather of present and near-future conditions, there’s an imperative to imagine that we aren’t facing the death of everyone, or the end of existence. No matter what the worst-case models using the most advanced forecasting of feedback loops may predict, we have to act as if we can assume some degree of human continuity. What happens in the next decades is instead, as the climate reporter Kate Aronoff has said, about who gets to live in the 21st century. And the question of who gets to live, and how, has always been the realm of politics.

The most radical and hopeful response to climate change shouldn’t be, What do we give up? It should remain the same one that plenty of ordinary and limited humans ask themselves each day: How do we collectively improve our overall quality of life? It is a welfare question, one that has less to do with consumer choices — like changing light bulbs — than with the spending of trillions and trillions of still-available dollars on decoupling economic growth and wealth from carbon-based fuels and carbon-intensive products, including plastics.

In 2016 we knocked on doors for Sanders and, like many thousands of others, were liberated and transformed by his campaign. Sanders’s long-standing rhetorical ploy has been to reframe what was taken for granted (a private insurance market for health care) as itself a form of madness and to reframe what is considered mad, bad, and dangerous (a public insurer) as the bare minimum of what could be expected in a country as rich as the United States. To say this at the doors of hundreds of people, and to find that they agreed with you, was to feel sane yourself.

IN 2013, TWO OF the biggest publishers in the world — Penguin and Random House — merged into one behemoth. At the time one might have read the merger as a defensive consolidation against Amazon’s monopsony, a scenario in which one buyer controls the majority of the market. But instead the Penguin Random House merger delivered efficiencies of exactly the kind cynics expected. Layoffs have hit PRH in discrete waves, each of them damaging to the diversity and range of the publisher’s books and the people who publish them. Editors, publicists, sales reps, and warehouse workers have been let go. Imprints — many of them already on their last legs, half-hearted relics of mergers past — have shuttered. Amazon, meanwhile, didn’t notice a thing, except that books probably arrived at its warehouses in more efficient batches. Any leverage PRH might have had — and still has — is unlikely to be deployed by current management, who are masters of the permanent defensive crouch.

Henry Kissinger wrote in the first of his three memoirs (on page 1,261) that the shah “was for us that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally.” He readily agreed to Western demands for fifty-fifty profit sharing in Iranian oil operations and cracked down hard on internal opposition, arresting more than three thousand members of the communist Tudeh Party in the year or so following the coup and imprisoning a handful of officials for decades (he also granted American military advisers immunity from Iranian law). The shah worked with the CIA to set up a secret police force, SAVAK, that carried out the day-to-day work of political repression. He also became an avid purchaser, even a connoisseur, of American arms. By 1977, 35 percent of Iran’s annual budget was going to the military; a joke circulated among arms dealers that the shah read defense equipment manuals the way other men read Playboy. He placed orders for F-16 fighter jets, naval destroyers, nuclear-powered submarines, and more than a thousand tanks. The US even agreed to throw in nuclear reactors, with the shah reassuring American officials that he had no interest in pursuing nuclear weapons. Congress appreciatively estimated that Iran’s arms purchases from the US were “the largest in the world.”