Let me start with the most local of local stories: the intersection down the street from my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where Columbia Street meets Summit Street.

Since my family moved into the neighborhood in 2023, I’ve hated this intersection. It has no stop signs, no crosswalks, no signal. Crossing on foot with my son has meant grabbing his hand and hoping any oncoming cars would slow down, which, given that this is New York City, is maybe a 50/50 proposition at best. Everyone knew a stop sign or signal was needed, but the city did nothing.

That finally began to change late last year, after a 10-year-old girl was struck and injured by a car just two blocks north of the intersection. The neighborhood organized, packed a public meeting, and eventually walked a city official down the block so he could stand in the intersection and see what they saw every day. Which is how I woke up on July 17 to see four stop signs and freshly painted crosswalks at the intersection I hated so much.

My very local story is part of a much bigger one. Cars kill about 1.16 million people a year worldwide — more than the population of San Jose, California erased every year. Road injuries remain the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about.

For most of the 20th century, that was simply the price of moving around faster. Being in a car was the most dangerous thing most of us did on any given day, and we seemed to have no choice but to accept the consequences.

But, it turns out, we don’t. According to new data released last month, between 2011 and 2025, the rate at which the world’s roads killed people, measured against population, fell 21 percent, even as more than a billion motor vehicles were added to the world’s roads. It’s still far too high, and the death rate actually increased in Africa, as more vehicles are added to often substandard roads. But in epidemiological terms: Globally, exposure went up while deaths went down. What ultimately changed was an argument about whose fault it really is when a car crashes.

The doctor who decided crashes were not accidents

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that American cars were once all but literal death traps. In 1966, they killed 50,894 Americans and injured 1.9 million more, in vehicles with rigid steering columns aimed at the driver’s chest and metal dashboards studded with knobs that lacerated and impaled human bodies. The toll was horrific; as President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in 1966, the million and a half Americans who had died on the roads so far that century were “nearly three times as many Americans as we have lost in all our wars.”

Detroit’s answer to all this was that Americans were bad drivers. A doctor named William Haddon Jr. thought the industry was looking at the wrong thing. Haddon trained as a physician and came to car crashes as an epidemiologist. He saw them as systems failures and understood that cars had to be designed to protect drivers against themselves.

Haddon wasn’t working alone. In April 1959, a Labor Department official named Daniel Patrick Moynihan published “Epidemic on the Highways,” making a version of the same argument: The problem was how cars were built, not who was driving them. In 1965, the consumer advocate Ralph Nader — whom Moynihan had hired the year before to help write the government’s highway safety report — published Unsafe at Any Speed, a catalog of everything automakers already knew they should fix and had decided not to.

Nader’s book became a national bestseller, and, in September 1966, Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which finally gave the federal government power to mandate how cars could be built. Johnson appointed Haddon to lead the new federal traffic- and highway-safety agencies that later became National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

A safer system

NHTSA estimated that federal vehicle-safety standards prevented more than 860,000 deaths and 49 million nonfatal injuries from 1968 through 2019. Preliminary data released this week showed that the US motor vehicle death rate for the first quarter of 2026 was 0.99 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled: the second lowest first quarter figure on record and down 82 percent from the 1966 death rate, when Congress passed the vehicle safety act.

But while America has largely aimed to make crashes survivable, other countries decided that wasn’t ambitious enough. In October 1997, the Swedish parliament adopted a national policy called Vision Zero, built on the premise that nobody should be killed or seriously injured on the roads — and that, when someone is, ultimate responsibility belongs to the people who designed the system, rather than solely to the person who made the mistake. Sweden began adding median barriers to rural highways in 1998, and a national revision of speed limits rolled out in 2008-’09. Since Vision Zero’s adoption, Swedish road deaths have fallen about 61 percent, from 541 in 1997 to 213 in 2024 — about two deaths per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the EU.

New York adopted the same framework in February 2014, explicitly modeled on the Swedish work, and cut its default speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour that November. By the end of 2025, the city’s traffic deaths were down 31 percent from 2014. The year closed with 205 road deaths, the fewest since New York began keeping records in 1910. In the first half of 2026, pedestrian deaths were more than 42 percent below the comparable period in 2014.

Four stop signs on a Brooklyn corner are what that idea looks like at its smallest possible scale.

The people we left outside the car

But, in our effort to make our cars safer, we neglected to do the same for everyone else on the street. Between 2009 and 2023, US pedestrian deaths rose 80 percent, even as other categories of traffic deaths increased just 13 percent. By 2022, pedestrian deaths had climbed to a 40-year high — back to 1981 levels.

One major contributor is as simple as geometry. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that vehicles with hoods above 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to kill the pedestrian they hit than vehicles with hoods of 30 inches or less and a sloped profile. A low, sloped hood catches an adult at the legs and rolls the body up onto it. A tall flat one catches the torso and drives the body down and under. Light trucks — which have gone from under a fifth of new vehicle sales in 1975 to more than four-fifths today — accounted for 54 percent of US pedestrian deaths with a known vehicle type in 2023.

It’s only recently that this second curve has begun to bend. Preliminary state data indicated that US pedestrian deaths fell about 7 percent in 2025 to an estimated 6,732, a third consecutive annual decline. Part of it is that a pandemic-era spike in reckless driving is receding. Part is states spending on infrastructure and enforcement. And part is that cars now come with automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter.

Pedestrian-detecting automatic emergency braking is spreading, as well. IIHS found that it was associated with a 27 percent reduction in pedestrian crashes, though detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter. (But there is work to do, as those systems don’t reduce risk on unlit roads at night, and more than three-quarters of pedestrian deaths happen after dark.)

Driver Zero

I’m glad there are stop signs at Summit and Columbia now, but it was a good outcome produced by a bad process — one that required a child being hit by a car to get started. There are more dangerous intersections in this country than there are communities with the voice and the stamina to demand fixes. A real Vision Zero wouldn’t wait for the crash; it would identify which intersections could kill someone and fix those first.

For now, though, I’m simply happy that, in my local corner of the world, the streets got just a little bit safer.

New York is also an outlier. As my colleague Marina Bolotnikova wrote earlier this year, Vision Zero hasn’t worked nearly as well elsewhere in the country, largely because the American public is less accepting of road designs that inconvenience drivers.

That’s why the US, for all its long-term improvement, lags behind its peers. Over the decade to 2021, road deaths fell 36 percent in WHO’s European region and did not move at all in the Americas. The US sees about 12 road deaths per 100,000 people, more than twice the rate in Australia, Israel, or South Korea — a gap so large that the International Transport Forum publishes OECD road safety averages both with the US included and without it, presumably to keep us from skewing the results.

Since the US probably won’t adopt Sweden’s approach, a more realistic hope might be autonomous vehicles. This month, the Insurance Institute compared about 50 million driverless Waymo miles across four cities with human driving in the same places and found that, per mile, the robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes of the kind a human driver would typically report to police. Waymo’s own tally across more than 220 million driverless miles claimed 93 percent fewer injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians — which is to say the technology is best at precisely the thing American road design has been worst at.

If Haddon fundamental insight was that systems have to be built to counter the inevitable errors when a human drives a two-ton hunk of metal and glass at 60 mph, then maybe it makes sense that the ultimate system response is to remove the human altogether. For now, though, I’m simply happy that, in my local corner of the world, the streets got just a little bit safer.

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This story was originally published on June 29 in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place. 

The president who presided over the country’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice president had resigned in disgrace, making him the sole US president who was never actually elected. The Vietnam War had ended in defeat and disgrace when Saigon fell the year before, after the deaths of nearly 60,000 American servicemembers. Inflation hit double digits in 1974 and stayed ugly, unemployment sat near 8 percent, and economists had to invent a word — stagflation — for an economy that seemed to encompass the worst of both worlds.

Given all that, you might assume the national mood leading up to the 200th anniversary was grim. And, yet, on July 4, 1976, something strange happened: Americans threw themselves a hell of a party. 

In New York Harbor, more than 200 tall ships sailed up the Hudson for Operation Sail, drawing an estimated six million spectators — the largest crowd in the city’s history. Ford reviewed the fleet from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. It was the same scene up and down the country that day: parades in small towns, fireworks over the National Mall, church bells ringing in unison at 2 o’clock. It was one cathartic day of celebration after a decade that had offered little reason for it.

And when pollsters asked people how they felt about the country’s future that year, the mood was, improbably, sunny. A Roper survey found more Americans were optimistic than pessimistic about the future by a nearly three to one ratio. More than three-quarters told Gallup the nation had already achieved at least a fair amount of its founding ideals. Somehow, a nation that was in the middle of a genuinely miserable decade looked in the mirror and liked what it saw.

Jump forward 50 years, to this year’s 250th anniversary, and you’ll find the vibes flipped. Roughly 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters the nation is on the wrong track. A majority say its best years are behind it. About three-quarters think today’s children will end up worse off than their parents. Asked a version of that same founding-ideals question from 1976, 77 percent now say the founders would be disappointed in what we’ve become.

But just as they were in 1976, the vibes don’t match reality. Set the mood aside and look only at the numbers, and the country that felt so good in 1976 was, by the most important measures, a worse place to be alive than the country that now feels so terrible on its 250th birthday.

Start with whether you’re alive

Let’s start with the most basic test of how a society is doing: how long its people live.

Life expectancy at birth in the US was 72.6 years in 1976. In 2024, it reached a record high of 79 years — an extra six and a half years of life. At the start of life, a baby born now is far more likely to survive its first year than one born during the Bicentennial, while cancer, once nearly a synonym for a death sentence, now kills a much smaller share of the people it strikes. 

The US made those gains by stopping some of its worst habits, things that were commonplace in 1976 . You might have seen the Bicentennial celebrations through a cloud of smoke, as cigarettes were woven into ordinary life — on airplanes, in offices, in hospital wards — and roughly 37 percent of adults smoked. Today, it is closer to one in 10, and it keeps falling. 

The heart disease and lung cancer that were connected to all that tobacco have receded with it. Add seatbelts and airbags, better trauma care, and cheap drugs that lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and the result is a country where the things that were most likely to kill an American in 1976 are less deadly now.

The America of 1976 sat at the leading edge of a brutal crime wave; the murder rate would peak in 1980 and stay high for more than a decade. By the early 2020s, however, violent crime had fallen back to roughly a 50-year low, and homicide rates this year may end up at a record low. And the single most dangerous thing most Americans do — get behind the wheel of a car — is far less likely to kill them, with the death rate per mile driven now a fraction of what it was at the Bicentennial.

The country got cleaner, and richer, and fairer

In 1976, the air in American cities carried lead, an honest-to-God neurotoxin that was pumped out of every tailpipe of the more than 90 percent of American vehicles that used leaded gasoline. 

Rivers literally caught fire: The Cuyahoga in Cleveland had burned so many times it became a national joke, and Lake Erie was widely written off as dead. And things were bad outside Ohio, too. In Los Angeles, the smog got thick enough to keep kids inside at recess and erase the nearby mountains from view.

Since 1970, however, the combined emissions of the six main air pollutants the EPA tracks have fallen 78 percent — even as the economy nearly quadrupled in real terms, the population grew by tens of millions, and Americans drove far more miles. That split, with growth going one way and pollution the other, is one of the least celebrated but most consequential triumphs of the past half-century, the product of legislative efforts and technological response. And lead? It’s essentially disappeared from the air. 

And it’s not just economic or environmental statistics that have improved; society advanced, as well. Women now earn the majority of college degrees. The Black poverty rate sits near a record low. Support for same-sex marriage is now the norm — maybe the single biggest social change from 1976, when homosexuality was criminalized in most states. Pick a metric more or less at random, and the line usually runs the right way.

This is not a matter of cherry-picking a few flattering numbers. It is the overwhelming direction of the evidence, across health, wealth, safety, rights, even the basic cleanliness of the physical world an American walks through every day. Measured against its own recent past, the US is in some of the best shape it has ever been.

So what’s with the bad vibes?

A more perfect union doesn’t mean perfect

Well, some things genuinely got worse, and they are not insignificant. 

Americans’ faith in their government has collapsed; fewer than one in five now trust Washington to do the right thing, down from solid majorities in the 1960s — and the country is more polarized than it was in 1976. Democratic decline and even collapse is a live threat. Those economic gains I highlighted above have flowed disproportionately upward. The top 1 percent’s share of income, near a historic low in 1976, has since roughly doubled.

Climate change barely registered in 1976. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has since climbed from around 330 parts per million to about 427, and warming will only get worse in the future. And buying a home increasingly feels out of reach for many. By 2024, a record share of households spent more than a third of their income on housing. (Notably, though, the percentage of Americans who own a home is slightly higher than it was in 1976, and those homes are much larger on average.) 

These are real problems, but they remain exceptions to a broader half-century trend of improvement. And a country that scrubbed the lead from its air and put out smoking can overcome new challenges, as well. 

Which brings us back to a tale of two birthdays. In 1976, Americans had less of nearly everything you can count, and, yet, they reported feeling good about the future anyway. In 2026, we have more, and we don’t. 

Just as it can be for a person, a country’s mood is a poor instrument; it measures the story we are telling ourselves more than the lives we are actually living. For all our pessimism about the state of the nation, more than three-quarters of Americans say they are satisfied with their own lives.

The Americans crowding New York Harbor in 1976 were cheering a country that was sicker, dirtier, more dangerous, and less free than the one we live in now. But they were right to cheer; the line was already bending the right way, and it kept bending. It turns out a nation can travel a long way, even while it is convinced it is going nowhere.

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Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a small pill called enlicitide. It is a tablet you swallow once a day on an empty stomach with a sip of black coffee, water, or tea. But it does something that until now took a needle and a specialist’s prescription: It lowers the most dangerous kind of cholesterol by nearly 60 percent, about as much as the strongest injectable drugs on the market.

If that sounds less innovative than some of the medical advances I sometimes cover here — there’s no AI or gene editing involved — you’re missing the story. Enlicitide is just the latest example of how medicine has been quietly making progress against the deadliest thing in the modern world.

That thing is heart disease. It has been the leading cause of death in the United States for essentially a century, and in 2025 it killed 694,708 Americans — about one in five deaths — more than every form of cancer combined. Around the world, cardiovascular disease kills roughly 20 million people a year, the biggest cause of death on the planet.

But today, our enemy is on the retreat. In the US, the age-adjusted death rate from cardiovascular disease has fallen about three-quarters since 1950. In plain terms: A 60-year-old today is roughly four times less likely to die of heart disease this year than a 60-year-old was when Harry Truman was president. As I wrote last year, deaths specifically from heart attacks are down 89 percent since 1970.

That progress comes down to a single number. Low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, aka the “bad” cholesterol your doctor always wants you to lower. Until recently, a high LDL score was all but inescapable, something you could nudge lower with a better diet and willpower but struggle to really fix. What has changed is that we can now lower LDL for nearly anyone who needs it — further, more easily, and earlier in life than before.

A lifesaving genetic mutation

It’s a story that goes back 20 years. In the early 2000s, two geneticists at University of Texas Southwestern, Helen Hobbs and Jonathan Cohen, wanted to solve a medical mystery: Why did some individuals have striking low cholesterol levels? They combed the Dallas Heart Study for an answer. They found a handful — many of them Black Americans — carrying a broken copy of a gene called PCSK9. Their bodies cleared LDL from the blood with unusual efficiency, and the payoff was staggering: carriers of the strongest variant had about 28 percent lower LDL and roughly 88 percent lower risk of heart disease than people who did not carry the mutation.

That finding proved lowering LDL prevents heart attacks, and it handed drugmakers a target: copy that gene. Every PCSK9 drug since — including the new enlicitide — imitates a mutation a few people in Dallas were simply born with.

Millions of Americans still take the old cholesterol-lowering workhorses, statins, and they’ve proven highly effective at reducing heart disease for most people. But not everyone: Some people can’t tolerate the muscle aches; others take them faithfully and still don’t get their LDL low enough. Enlicitide is built for exactly those people: a pill as cholesterol-lowering as an injection but without the needle, and a drug that spares them the statin muscle aches.

Closing the loop

If the pill is today, gene editing is tomorrow — and it may be the answer to a problem no pill can reliably solve: getting people to keep taking their medicine.

About half of patients on statins quit them within a year, and a daily pill, however potent, only helps the people who actually take it. So that demands a fix you can’t forget. A company called Verve Therapeutics, now owned by Eli Lilly, has been testing a treatment that makes a single-letter edit to the PCSK9 gene in the liver — one infusion, in theory for life. In its first human trial, published over the spring in the New England Journal of Medicine, a single dose cut LDL by as much as 62 percent, and held it there for more than a year. Instead of a pill mimicking the effects of the genetic mutation that protected those people in Dallas, gene editing just switches off the gene.

As important as it is, cholesterol isn’t the whole story when it comes to heart disease. There’s smoking, which declined from about 40 percent of US adults in the 1960s to under 15 percent today, sparing countless arteries. High blood pressure — the silent condition that killed President Franklin D. Roosevelt at 63 in 1945, when doctors had few effective ways to treat it — can now be caught early and treated with cheap generic pills.

And then there are the GLP-1s. More than one in 10 US adults say they are currently on an anti-obesity drug, and whatever else you may think of them, they’ll make a significant dent in heart disease. In one major trial semaglutide cut cardiovascular events by 20 percent.

The war continues

Still, the war on heart disease won’t be easy to win.

Just because a pill like enlicitide has been proven to lower a lab value does not mean it’s yet proven to lower deaths. They should — the injectable versions of these drugs cut heart attacks and strokes by about 20 percent in long trials. But enlicitide’s own outcomes study won’t conclude for years.

Precisely because the condition itself so widespread, treatments for heart disease will only be effective if they are equally widespread.

Heart disease is shifting, too. The same research showing heart-attack deaths down 89 percent found deaths from other heart conditions — heart failure, arrhythmias, hypertensive disease — up 81 percent since 1970, though because heart attacks were killing several times as many people, overall heart-disease deaths have still dropped by about two-thirds since 1970.  Some of that shift is perversely the result of success: people who might have died of an initial heart attack now live long enough for the heart to wear out in other ways. And some of this is the reverse of progress: As smoking and cholesterol fell, obesity climbed to about 40 percent of US adults, pulling diabetes and high blood pressure with it.

And then there’s perhaps the biggest problem in medicine: access. A 60 percent drop in cholesterol helps only the people who can actually get the drug. Half of patients abandon cheap statins within a year. Enlicitide arrives at about $300 a month with uncertain insurance coverage. The gene edit, whenever it becomes available, will certainly cost far more, and at first will reach only the sickest.

More than 60 percent of US adults are projected to have some form of heart disease over the course of their life. Precisely because the condition itself so widespread, treatments for heart disease will only be effective if they are equally widespread.

Which brings us back to that unassuming little pill. It’s just a tablet, doing what a generation of scientists spent their careers trying to do: turning one of the deadliest numbers in medicine into one you can change. It’s the kind of progress that’s too easy to miss — until it saves your life.

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In 2019, the AI researcher Rich Sutton published a short essay called “The Bitter Lesson.” Seventy years of AI research, he argued, kept demonstrating the same thing: The most effective ways to train AI rely on raw, brute-force computing power — simply scaling up — rather than clever approaches built on human insight. It didn’t matter how elegant the researchers’ work was. More compute would win every time. It’s a bitter lesson because, well, no one wants to accept that even the best efforts can go unrewarded.

This summer, climate change has been teaching its own kind of bitter lesson. Last week smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires reached more than 120 million Americans, sending out air quality alerts across 18-plus states from Minnesota to Virginia. Those wildfires, which were made more likely by the effects of climate change, followed record-breaking heat waves in Europe that contributed to the deaths of thousands of people.

Disasters like these inevitably renew calls for climate action, but no current US emissions policy, no amount of carbon cutting now, could clear the air, just as nothing Europe has done on climate — and it has done more than any other region, at no small cost — could protect it from those killer temperatures. Not this summer, not this decade, not the one after. The steps countries take now to reduce carbon emissions, to mitigate climate change, will not protect them from the present-day effects of climate change.

That’s the bitter lesson of climate change, and 2026 is the summer it has become unignorable. The dangerous effects we’ve been warned about are here, locked in on every timescale that matters to the people living through them. We can’t prevent the worst from happening right now, so we need to figure out how we’re going to adapt to it. 

The smoke we can’t stop

Canadian wildfire smoke is as close to an unstoppable disaster as exists today. The fires are Canada’s, the ignition is mostly lightning, the fuel is a subcontinent of boreal forest no fire agency can manage, and the whole system sits outside US jurisdiction. While strategies like prescribed burning and forest thinning can help reduce the wildfires that crop up in the western US, the sheer scale of Canadian forests makes such management far more difficult, maybe impossible. There is no timescale on which American mitigation clears American air of Canadian wildfire smoke. 

What this means is that for this wildfire smoke, at this moment, adaptation may be all there is.

American law has already conceded the point. Under the Clean Air Act’s Exceptional Events Rule, a state can petition the Environmental Protection Agency to strike wildfire-smoke days from the record used to judge whether its air is legally clean. In other words, the official response to one of the country’s fastest-growing air-quality threats is to delete it from the ledger. 

It’s true that climate attribution science ties heat waves to warming with the highest confidence of any extreme, while wildfire is messier — a compound event filtered through ignition, fuel, and fire weather. But fire seasons are lengthening, fuels are drying, and the most extreme wildfire events on Earth more than doubled between 2003 and 2023. The pattern is intensifying fire in particular regions — the boreal north among them — and the smoke goes where the wind says.

And that smoke is worse than it looks. Wildfire PM2.5 — the microscopic particles that are particularly dangerous —  is roughly three to four times more toxic to the lungs, per unit of mass, than ordinary urban particulate matter. During major smoke events, pediatric asthma visits can spike by more than 30 percent, and Harvard researchers have found the cardiorespiratory damage persists for months after the sky turns blue again. That’s especially dangerous for vulnerable populations like babies and pregnant women.

We can’t affect the winds, we struggle to stop the fires, and any current attempt to reduce warming enough to make those infernos less likely won’t be felt for years. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless to protect ourselves from wildfire smoke, any more than we are from extreme heat.

We can purify indoor air, and it costs less than you probably think. Strap four furnace filters to a box fan — creating a Corsi-Rosenthal box — and indoor PM2.5 drops by roughly half; in testing during actual wildfire smoke, a DIY unit cut fine particles by about 56 percent in a large room and close to 99 percent in a small sealed one.

For heat, the toolkit is even better known — and one of the best proofs it works is in, of all places, France. The historic 2003 heat wave killed some 15,000 people there, most of them elderly and alone. The national heat plan built in its aftermath — tiered alerts, registries of vulnerable residents, check-in calls, cool rooms — cut the death toll of comparable heat waves by roughly 90 percent: When France hit its all-time record of 114.8°F in 2019, fewer than 1,500 died, per the Christian Science Monitor. A recent European analysis estimates a rerun of 2003 would now kill 77 percent fewer people in France than in a world that never adapted.

So technologies exist to protect ourselves. What’s too often missing are the standards, money, and the drive to deploy protection before the disaster arrives instead of after.

Catching up to today

When it comes to wildfire smoke, some governments are ahead of the game — and some aren’t. Washington state, Oregon, and California now regulate outdoor workers’ smoke exposure by air-quality index, under rules like Cal/OSHA’s wildfire-smoke standard; California funds “clean air centers” with upgraded filtration where people can shelter on bad-air days; Colorado’s Clean Air for Schools program ships free HEPA units to K-12 classrooms. A purifier humming in a classroom is essentially doing for smoke what a cooling center does for heat.

When it comes to heat, some parts of Europe are catching up. Barcelona now runs a network of nearly 400 “climate shelters” — libraries, museums, retrofitted schoolyards — with the goal of putting one within a 10-minute walk of every resident. For the first time, the city is keeping libraries open through August to do it, which, as anyone who has visited Europe in the late summer knows, is no small thing.

So adaptation exists, and it is saving lives. But this summer has also shown what happens when cities, states, and countries aren’t ready. 

In the US, the Midwestern and Northeastern states that spent last week under smoke alerts have almost none of the protections against wildfire smoke that have become more common in Western states, and no one is required to build them, because the country has no enforceable national indoor air-quality standard at all. In Europe, national heat plans are still reluctant to reach for the most powerful tool on the shelf. About one European household in five has air conditioning, compared to nearly nine in ten in the US, in large part because much of the continent still treats the machine as a moral defect. 

In both cases, rich regions that have largely taken climate mitigation more seriously than some of their neighbors aren’t pursuing adaptations they need. Which really means not taking climate change as seriously as they should. 

Accepting the bitter lesson

For a generation, adaptation was the word climate advocates were often reluctant to say out loud. In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore called adaptation “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins.” (He later changed his mind.) And in fairness, “we’ll just adapt” has often been a delaying tactic, an easy out for polluters. 

But the ground has shifted under that caution, because the projections did exactly what projections are supposed to do: they came true. 

Longer fire seasons, deadlier heat waves, smoke reaching places that never used to see it — this summer is the confirmation. And that changes what seriousness requires. If you’ve spent decades warning people that the effects of climate change are coming, you can’t treat readying for those effects as a distraction from the real work. None of this argues for easing up on emissions — each ton that isn’t emitted is adaptation nobody has to build. But preparing for what you predicted is what believing your own prediction looks like.

For AI researchers, Rich Sutton’s lesson was bitter for a specific reason. Those who resisted its conclusion weren’t foolish; they resisted it because it seemed to undercut all their hard work. They resisted it because it didn’t seem fair, just as it’s not fair that countries and states that have in many ways done much to mitigate climate change find themselves just as vulnerable, if not more so, than peers that have done comparatively little. 

But here’s the other half of Sutton’s lesson: The researchers who accepted it won. They stopped defending their cleverness and built what worked. That option is open to climate politics too. The atmosphere isn’t fair, but it is consistent, and it will deliver next summer’s version of this one on schedule. We can be ready. The bitter lesson is only bitter until you have the will to act on it. 

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