Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Matt McGrath and Dahr Jamail each point out some of the most important immediate effects of climate change. And Kate Marvel discusses the challenge we face in trying to avoid more severe breakdown in the longer term:

You may have heard that we have 12 years to fix everything. This is well-meaning nonsense, but it’s still nonsense. We have both no time and more time. Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down. And, true, we’ve chosen to throw ourselves headlong down the hill at breakneck speed. But we can always choose to begin the long, slow, brutal climb back up. If we must argue about what the view will be like when we get there, let’s at least agree to turn around first.

It’s true that we’re not going to get utopia. The planet has already warmed by one degree Celsius. Most of the coral reefs are going to die, and many of the glaciers will melt. Climate change is here, leaving grubby human fingerprints on parched, burned, flooded and melted landscapes. But we don’t have to settle for dystopia. It’s going to be worse, but it doesn’t have to be bleak. We can have a “topia,” an ordinary future where we go about ordinary lives in cities on stilts, missing what we’ve lost but looking forward to better things. There is light in the future that doesn’t come from burning.

- Meanwhile, the Mound of Sound is rightly concerned that international trade agreements will be interpreted as preventing governments from doing what's needed to salvage a liveable climate.

- Claire Cain Miller examines the cost of parenting - and the increasing inequality in how much money is available to be spent on children. And Alex Matthews-King discusses how economic factors can affect a child's brain development for life.

- Finally, Owen Jones writes about the value of the UK's council housing - and points out that MPs who live in communities with a range of incomes and life situations are far better positioned to engage with a full range of constituent concerns than those who isolate themselves in wealthy enclaves.