It took about an hour and a half in Democratic Debate 2: Part 2: Wow, Bennet Is Getting a Lot of Time before we got a question about an existential threat to human civilization as we know it. Yes, the climate crisis eventually got its due, and Washington Governor Jay Inslee had the chance to jump to centerstage on his signature issue. He shut down frontrunner Joe Biden's talk of working something out on coal, trumpeting that there is no time for any of that hemming and hawing. The crisis is upon us. Things seem to be happening sooner and faster than many thought—or perhaps hoped. It must be met head on, now, with overwhelming force and conviction. We must fundamentally rework our economy and our society to meet the challenge.

Andrew Yang, on the other hand, took a slightly different tack. The entrepreneur's own campaign centerpiece is universal basic income (UBI), a no-strings-attached payment from the federal government of $1,000 a month that might not be laughed off so easily a decade from now—or sooner. He applied this proposal to the climate crisis with some fairly macabre logic, dispensing with the indestructible optimism of the politician and offering those listening the darker side. We are too late to stop the cataclysm, he said. We can only mitigate the damage.

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Andrew Yang essentially says we're all screwed on climate change, so therefore we all need more money in our pocket so we can move to "higher ground" pic.twitter.com/78Ge1B2zLp — Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 1, 2019

The point that we cannot tackle the issue without cooperation from other carbon polluters, like China and India, is true. The point that further warming is essentially baked in because we have not yet felt the effects of some of the carbon we've pumped into the air already is likely true. The last four years have indeed been the warmest in history. Are we, as he says, 10 years too late? Is it too late to save the lowest-lying areas of our coastal cities? It doesn't sound so preposterous if you allow the aggregate of what we know to trickle into mind, if you take stock of what we're already seeing across our world right now and the near-certainty that the path will descend further into the deep and dark. What will we do to alter the trajectory of our civilization and our lives? How fast will we do it?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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