We’ve long found different ways to explain that the world is made up of haves and have-nots. We live in the developed world or the developing world. There are those who are advantaged and those who are disadvantaged. And then, of course, there’s the one percent and everyone else.
These are the familiar binaries we use to describe economic, political and social inequality, and they shape how we talk about opportunity, risk and responsibility. They help explain who tends to flourish and who tends to struggle.
But under global warming, the climate journalist Jeff Goodell thinks, there may be a new way of describing this dichotomy: the cooled and the cooked.
It’s a phrase that cuts straight to the physics of a warming planet — and to the moral implications of those physics. In a world of intensifying heat waves, longer summers, and rising nighttime temperatures, survival itself may increasingly hinge on something deceptively simple: access to cooling.
