Maybe you’ve seen: “The 15 hottest days, in the world’s hottest month.”

It’s not like we weren’t warned: Nasa scientist James Hansen testified to Congress in 1988 about what was coming. We ignored it. By now, it’s everyone’s fault.

It’s the fault of:

* People who have spent decades voting against nuclear power.

* People who support NEPA. People who have never heard of NEPA.

* NIMBYs who work and vote to keep the vast majority of domiciles car-dependent.

* NIMBYs who make sure we can’t build more housing in dense, green cities like NYC (where I used to live, but moved, due to affordability issues).

* People who vote against bike lanes.

* People who could have picked the smaller vehicles and didn’t.

* People who could have picked up the bikes and didn’t.

* People who could have installed solar and didn’t.

* People who vote against mass transit (“It will never be practical”).

* Me. I only have so much effort to push into resisting the efforts of hundreds of millions if not billions of other people who are enacting the system. I try to resist but it’s hard for one person.

* People who realize that they’d like to live differently but are pushed into that single exurban direction by the legal and regulatory structure of American and, often, Canadian life.

Even the people who’d like to live greener—without a car, without relentless parking lots blighting the landscape, without having to live in single-unit housing—mostly can’t, in the United States. Or if we can, we’re merely moving the next marginal candidate who’d like to live densely into the exurbs of Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and so on. Those are the places where it’s legal to build housing, so that’s where most people are going. I’ve moved from New York to Phoenix because I can afford the latter and can (barely) afford the former. Most of Phoenix is impossible without a car, and dangerous on a bike. It’s tragic, and I’d love to see change, but the system is forcing me in a particular direction and it’s incredibly expensive to try resisting it.

It’s the fault of no one, and everyone. There are some green shoots of change happening, albeit slowly, but we needed to get serious about nuclear power and the removal of non-safety zoning restrictions decades ago. We didn’t, and now the price is showing up. We need to get serious today, but we’re not.

Because fault is diffused, most of us, me included, feel there’s nothing substantial we can do—so we do nothing. Years pass. The problems worsen, though we can justify to ourselves that the problems are just headlines. Insurance becomes hard to get. The deniers set up their own alternative universes, where information only confirms and never disconfirms their worldviews. The bullshit asymmetry principle plays out: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

“What if scientists have over-predicted the consequences of global warming?” people ask. The flipside is never considered: “What if they’re underpredicting the consequences?”

The system goes on. Maybe solar, wind, and geothermal get cheap fast enough to partially save us. Maybe direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide proceeds fast enough.

But maybe it doesn’t. And then the crisis will be all of our faults. And no one’s.