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By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Try to be coolheaded about climate risk, and even conventional estimates of damage will overwhelm you. The cultural mood has lately turned against climate alarm — “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” Vice President JD Vance scoffed at the Munich Security Conference last week — but new temperature records are set almost by the month, and the tally of destruction continues to mount.

In his new book, “Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World — and the Future,” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein cites one estimate that, since 1990, carbon from the world’s five largest emitters is responsible for $6 trillion in income loss around the world. Some researchers have suggested that damage from that already-emitted carbon could grow 80-fold over this century. According to calculations by Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, the “social cost of carbon” from the United States alone reaches $1 trillion in yearly damages globally. Other estimates run higher.

What are you supposed to do with numbers like these? They are simply too large to be metabolized into policy, as climate diplomats have often emphasized (including to me). They make any American effort to alleviate climate suffering abroad look pathetically tiny. It’s as though they were beamed from another universe, in which wonky technocrats could solve any problem if we gave them the right data and applied the proper discounting rate.

Sunstein is almost the caricature of that wonky technocrat, a distinguished legal theorist (and sometime philosopher and behavioral economist) who helped run and reshape the federal government as Barack Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “Climate Justice” is a measured meditation on our obligations to one another in a warming world, and a reminder that, among all its other dizzying and distressing features, global warming is a red-hot problem from moral philosophy, asking of us, who counts and who doesn’t?

Sunstein and I spoke last week about the cause of climate justice, the philosophy of “moral cosmopolitanism” and the very uncertain fate of the federal bureaucracy under Trump 2.0. Here is our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity:

In the book, you write, “Here is my starting point: Each person should be counted equally, no matter where they live, and no matter when they live.” That might strike many people as somewhat radical, especially given how much we seem to be moving away from principles of universality and mutual obligation.

Yes, I feel a little bit like writing this book was like writing a celebration of folk music the day after Dylan........

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