Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism? by Elizabeth Kolbert | The New York Review of Books

Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism? by Elizabeth Kolbert | The New York Review of Books: What’s going to determine how much the planet on average warms is how much CO2 gets added to the atmosphere in total. To have a reasonable shot at limiting warming to two degrees, the general consensus among scientists is that aggregate emissions since industrialization began in the mid-eighteenth century must be held to a trillion metric tons. Almost 600 billion of those tons have already been emitted, meaning that humanity has already blown through more than half of its “carbon budget.” If current trends continue, it will burn through the rest in the next twenty-five years. Thus, what is essential to preserving the possibility of 2 degrees is reversing these trends, and doing so immediately.