Sooner or later, climate change will consume our economy. If we are wise, we will let this happen sooner, and make massive preemptive investments into green energy and sustainable infrastructure; this will cost a lot up front, but it will mitigate even greater costs down the road. More likely, we’ll kick the can down the road, and then we’ll find ourselves paying for disaster relief, mass migrations, civil unrest, plague, famine, and everything else that comes with global warming. One way or the other, we’ll pay. Estimates vary, but the more plausible ones hover around a third of GDP.

In developing countries experiencing significant economic growth, this will be manageable. In developed countries that have already made big investments in infrastructure and green energy, this will be manageable. But in the United States, where growth will probably slow and where our investments are low, this is going to hit our economy hard.

Couple this with so many other trends of late capitalism — outsourcing, inequality, wage stagnation — and the prospects for your average American over the next fifty years look pretty grim. Liberalism will have no answer for this. It will offer the same useless panaceas it always has — vocational training, targeted tax cuts, business subsidies, and so on – but it will offer them to generations who’ve only seen their living standards fall and their futures disappear.