Thread by @NYMag

Our latest cover: A trillion tons of carbon hangs in the air, put there by the world’s rich, an existential threat to its poor. Can we remove it? @dwallacewells reports nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells We know how much carbon has been emitted and by which countries, which means we know who is most responsible and who will suffer most and that they are not the same nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells We know that the burden imposed on the world’s poorest by its richest is gruesome, that it is growing, and that it represents a climate apartheid demanding reparation — or should know it nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells We know we can remove some of that carbon from the atmosphere and undo at least some of the damage nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells We know the cost of doing so using tools we have today. And we know that unless we use them, the problem will never go away nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells Warming is chiefly described as an ecological crisis. But it’s also a moral catastrophe, engineered by the sheltered nations of the global North in the recent past, and suffered by those, in the global South, least responsible and least prepared nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells One inarguable measure of responsibility for anything that’s been done is what it would take to undo it nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells What is owed is this: by the U.S., $50 trillion; by China, about $30 trillion; by the U.K., $8 trillion. In total, the bill would come to $250 trillion, more than half of all the wealth that exists in the world today nym.ag/3ECoIyh

@dwallacewells These figures are a provocation — naïve, like many moral propositions. But they’re a way of articulating the scale of the ecological and humanitarian crime we are watching unfold, often pretending we are not perpetrating it ourselves. @dwallacewells writes nym.ag/3ECoIyh