“I don’t think I have it in me. I think most people don’t, even if they think they do. In any case, barring nuclear war, our generation—the very ones who might have prevented this catastrophe—will be spared the worst.”

“I just read a review of a book about some lab worker who purposely unleashes a pandemic flu virus in the hopes of killing enough humans to save the environment.”

“Oh yeah? And how did that work out for the environment?”

“The reviewer didn’t say. You know, not wanting to be a spoiler.”

“Some jerk made a joke about me being a spoiler. ‘Oh shoot,’ he tweeted, ‘now we know how life on earth ends.’ I think that was supposed to be witty.”

“Just sarcastic, I think.”

“I’m reporting the facts. Why should so much of the response be so hostile to me?”

“It’s your attitude,” I said. “You come across as cranky and arrogant—bullying, even. And you can’t just get up there and tell people there’s no hope.”

“You mean the truth? Because you can’t seriously believe people are going to get their shit together and turn things around in the dozen or so years we’ve got before we reach the point of no return.”

“I don’t know. But there’s something about the way you present the awful truth, almost as if you took pleasure in it, as if it gave you some kind of grim satisfaction. In other words, your misanthropy shows through.”

He laughed. “My defense mechanism, you mean. You can’t seriously believe I take any pleasure in imagining the suffering in store for my grandchildren. But it’s true, I do feel pretty hostile myself. All other issues aside, who could ever forgive those Americans—and I’m talking about all the privileged, well-educated ones—who elected a climate change denialist to the world’s most powerful office, or the oil CEOs who covered up their own research about the connection between fossil fuels and global warming way back when something might have been done about it. The enormity of that surpasses all the world’s episodes of genocide, in my view. I don’t know about you, but I’ve completely lost faith in people to do the right thing.”

“But you must have some hope or you wouldn’t keep speaking out.”