Climate change is the acceptable price of modernity. That, in a nutshell, is the conclusion that Energy Secretary Chris Wright reaches in his recent essay in The Economist, a composition representing the studied fatalism increasingly found in the debate on energy transition.

Tldr: we're going to accelerate climate change, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I suspect Republican politicians and American fossil fuel companies got together, looked at the real studies, and realized climate change will hurt North America much less than it will the rest of the world.

So they put a plan together: seal the borders, move manufacturing back to the US, seize Canada and Greenland, and prepare for the United States to dominate the world as less well-positioned nations collapse from climate disaster.

And the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the climate collapses, and the closer America comes to global dominion.

It's not fatalism. It's manifest destiny.