Tips and Tricks for Surviving the Apocalypse
Our global crisis gets reduced to individual habits, but a group of young plaintiffs may change that
Earlier this month, as the Canadian wildfires burned hundreds of miles away from my New York State town, I walked my dog through gritty air. I was anxious for her to get her business done quickly, but she plodded along. As she sniffed through the weeds, I looked up at the red sun glowing through smoke, and I thought about Exxon.
In the 1970s, a group of Exxon scientists was tasked with studying the impact that burning fossil fuels has on the environment, and the scientists returned to their employer with grim news. The carbon emitted by burning oil and gas was warming the planet, and there wasn’t much time to change course. “Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,” senior scientist James Black said to his bosses in 1978.
The Exxon team’s projections turned out to be stunningly accurate, and for a time Exxon l…