Flooding in a residential area near the Brazos River south of Houston in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey. Credit Barbara Davidson for The New York Times.

… The effects of individual lifestyle choices are ultimately trivial compared with what politics can achieve… Buying an electric car is a drop in the bucket compared with raising fuel-efficiency standards sharply… That is what is meant when politics is called a “moral multiplier”… We shouldn’t ask anyone — and certainly not everyone — to manage his or her own carbon footprint before we even really try to enact laws and policies that would reduce all of our emissions… That is the purpose of politics: that we can be and do better together than we might manage as individuals.

(David Wallace-Wells, “Time To Panic,” NYTimes, 2-16-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.