Climate and energy policy barely came up in last week’s debate between President Biden and Donald Trump. That might have been a good thing. Throughout the night, Biden struggled to string together coherent sentences to counter Trump’s lies and bluster. The humiliating spectacle kicked off a panic among Democratic Party elites about whether a visibly diminished Biden can beat Trump in November. Some of them claimed to have been misled about the scale of the problem, alleging that Biden’s inner circle hid evidence of his decline. With the time for straightforward solutions having passed, it might simply be too late to ward off a looming crisis of potentially untold magnitude. While some are proposing radical fixes, none offer the certainty of avoiding horrific outcomes.

The outlines of this crisis should sound familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in climate politics: A disaster sparks outrage among people who’ve been warned repeatedly—often by those to their left—about what was coming and how to avoid it, but who brushed off proposed solutions as hyperbolic and unhelpful. They had years to avoid this sort of destruction and now need a Hail Mary in both meanings of the phrase: a desperate bid to overcome terrible odds, and forgiveness.

But it’s not clear what success looks like in either of these cases. When it comes to the climate, some of the most apocalyptic worst-case scenarios might now be........

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