If the world turned off the tap of fossil fuels tomorrow, all hell would break loose. Something like 30 percent of global electricity and 9 percent of transport would still be running; billions of people would be stuck at home in the dark.

That’s why, even though world leaders now talk constantly about transitioning away from fossil fuels, they also fret about ensuring a supply of oil and gas for next week, next month, and next year. But right now they are also green-lighting new fossil-fuel projects that won’t start producing energy for years and won’t wind down operations for decades.

It is in this context that the Biden administration has just approved a highly contested proposal to drill for oil on federal land in northern Alaska. The project, called Willow, would damage the complex local tundra ecosystem and, according to an older government estimate, release the same amount of greenhouse gases annually as half a million homes. The administration hopes to soften the blow with a set of restrictions on further drilling on- and offshore in the area, as if to say that Willow will be the last major extraction project in the Alaskan Arctic—one last big score, to propel us across the energy gap.

But the oil from the three drill sites approved today won’t begin to flow for six years. It won’t address any of our next-week, next-month, or next-year supply concerns. In fact, Willow probably won’t do much of anything. By the time it’s finished, the gap may already be largely bridged. The world might not have enough renewable energy to power everything by 2029, but we’ll have more than enough to keep the lights on without additional drilling.

The Willow site is in a chunk of federally owned land called the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, to the west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the state’s North Slope. ConocoPhillips, which has a long-term lease on the land, originally sought to build five drill sites. Even after a lawsuit brought by environmental groups pushed the administration to withhold approval from two of them, the federal government’s environmental-impact statement for the project calculates that Willow would produce some 576 million barrels over approximately 30 years.

Activists say those barrels will come with increases in both greenhouse-gas emissions and local environmental destruction. The law firm Earthjustice, which has sued the government over elements of the plan, calls Willow a “carbon bomb.” The Willow Project has also been the target of a vigorous TikTok activism campaign. A letter from community leaders closest to the Willow site says that the proposed project threatens “our culture, traditions, and our ability to keep going out on the land and the waters.” Climate change is already warming the Arctic nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, and threatening to melt the permafrost of the North Slope; in fact, ConocoPhillips plans to deploy cooling devices called “thermosyphons” to keep the permafrost frozen under its drill pads. (Ryan Lance, the company’s chairman, said in a statement, “Willow fits within the Biden Administration’s priorities on environmental and social justice, facilitating the energy transition and enhancing our energy security.”)

[Read: How long until Alaska’s next oil disaster?]

But in a state that has long depended on oil and gas revenues, Willow has also received vigorous support. Leaders for Voice of the Arctic Inupiat, a coalition of North Slope Inupiat leaders, said in a statement that the project means “generational economic stability” for their region. ConocoPhillips estimates the project would produce “2,500 construction jobs and 300 permanent jobs,” and generate $8 billion to $17 billion in government revenue. Alaska’s two Republican senators and one Democratic congresswoman co-wrote an op-ed in support of the Willow project. “We all recognize the need for cleaner energy, but there is a major gap between our capability to generate it and our daily needs,” the bipartisan trio wrote.

It is true that there aren’t yet enough solar panels, wind turbines, or electric vehicles to quit fossil fuels cold turkey, and that the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent shock waves through the global energy economy that are still affecting supplies and prices. But assuming that this “state of emergency” will persist is a mistake, says Jennifer Layke, the global energy director of the World Resources Institute. Besides, the United States is now a net exporter of oil. In 2022, we exported nearly 6 million barrels a day, a new record. The decision to proceed with Willow, Layke told me, is an economic one; “it’s not about the renewables transition.” If it were, she said, we would probably not be drilling in the Arctic right now.

Given how quickly renewables are ramping up, experts say the world could meet its energy needs without drilling any new wells. In May 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization that tracks and analyzes the global energy system, produced a “roadmap” to achieve the goal of “net-zero emissions in 2050.” The report recommends an immediate end to new oil and gas fields, plus a ban on new coal mines and mine extensions—along with massive investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency and a tax on carbon. In this future, total energy supply drops 7 percent by the end of the decade, relative to 2020, as the mix of energy sources reshuffles, but increased energy efficiency makes up the difference.

[Read: There’s no scenario in which 2050 is “normal”]

The IEA pathway is a bit utopian, because it assumes that every nation tries its best to decarbonize all at once when the reality is likely to be far messier. Which brings us to another argument that Alaska’s political leaders have made in favor of approving Willow: “We need oil, and compared to the other countries we can source it from, we believe Willow is by far the most environmentally responsible choice,” they wrote in their op-ed. Indeed, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ran a modeling exercise to estimate the emissions associated with not drilling at the Willow site, it concluded that only 11 percent of total energy produced by the project would never be used in a world without Willow and that less than 10 percent of the energy not produced at Willow would be instead produced by natural gas or renewable sources. Most of the rest would be replaced by oil from abroad.

However, the BLM model is based on the way the energy market has looked in the past, not the way it is shaping up to look in a greener future. The report admits as much, saying, “Energy substitutes for Willow may look significantly different in a low carbon future.” Whether other oil-producing countries might also, over the course of the next several decades, eventually decide to limit or end their fossil-fuel production is not taken into account. Nor does the model include the effect of the United States keeping or losing the moral high ground it might need to help broker a substantive global cooperative agreement to enact such limits.

[Read: Fighting climate change was costly. Now it’s profitable.]

Even the BLM’s own model, which somewhat absurdly assumes that “regulations and consumption patterns will not change over the long term,” tells us that approving Willow will increase total global energy use and displace at least some energy that could have been generated cleanly—all to produce oil that experts say we simply do not need to bridge any “gap” between where we stand and the greener future ahead. Every day, the gap gets narrower. Moves like the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act are only compressing it further, as monetary incentives for building renewable energy infrastructure and buying electric cars work their magic on the collective behavior of Americans.

The IEA forecasts that the world will add as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the past 20. If renewables keep growing at their current rate, it projects, renewable energy would account for 38 percent of global electricity by 2027—two years before Willow oil would finally start flowing. Add in some serious demand reduction through energy-efficiency improvements and electrification of transport, and our remaining fossil-fuel needs will easily be met by existing drill sites. Forget about not needing Willow at the end of its 30-year life span. It’ll be obsolete before the ribbon is cut.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 4, Donald Trump gave a speech that my colleague Tom Nichols called “long and deranged,” adding that it was, “even by his delusional standards, dark and violent. Much of it was hallucinatory.” And revealing too—not just of Trump’s worsening state of mind but of the attitudes and temperament of MAGA world which Trump has, for seven years, personified. He remains the GOP’s apotheosis.

That doesn’t mean that Trump is unbeatable in the Republican presidential primary. He’s viewed throughout much of the party as a loser; his presentation is noticeably more lethargic than when he ran in 2016; and his obsessive promotion of lies about the 2020 election is exhausting even some of his loyal supporters. He’s also having trouble drawing large or enthusiastic crowds, which he never had a problem with in the past.

Despite that, at this early stage, Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are polling as the overwhelming favorites to win the Republican nomination. And although individual surveys are scattered, two recent ones, from Emerson and Fox, show Trump leading DeSantis by 30 and 15 points, respectively. (An Emerson poll from New Hampshire earlier this month showed Trump with a 41-point lead over DeSantis in that early-primary state.) But what the polls can’t measure is just how much the party’s sensibilities have fused with Trump’s, or how many imitators Trump has spawned. His imprint on the Republican Party is almost impossible to overstate. Which is why Trump’s remarks at CPAC are instructive.

[Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be]

One section of the nearly two-hour speech particularly caught my attention, and not mine alone. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher devoted an article to the implications of these comments:  

In 2016, I declared, “I am your voice” Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

“This is the final battle,” America’s 45th president said. “They know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”

To understand the modern Republican Party, you must understand the intense sense of fear and grievance that drives so many of its voters, which has in turn given rise to a profound desire for retribution and revenge, for inflicting harm on Democrats, progressives, and other perceived enemies. Those negative emotions existed before Donald Trump ran for the presidency, but he tapped into them with astonishing skill.

In September 2015, I had an email exchange with a person who worked for a theologically conservative church. In the course of sharing thoughts on the early stages of the Republican primary, I described my views and concerns: “I consider Mr. Trump to be in an entirely different category—wrong not just on the issues and philosophically unanchored, but alarmingly erratic … wholly untrustworthy, a flippant misogynist, crude and vulgar, and downright obsessive. As president, he would be unstable and dangerous. As leader of the Republican Party, he would be an embarrassment. As the de facto face of conservatism, he would be a disaster. That’s why I would not vote for him under any conceivable circumstances.”

Although Trump was not this person’s first choice in the primary, his response was instructive. “I am fed up with our side rolling over.” He then said: “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: [Barack Obama].”

Note the line of argument: My interlocutor agreed with all of the negative things I said about Trump—misogynistic, untrustworthy, erratic, psychologically unstable, and dangerous—but in the end, they didn’t matter. Trump was, to use a word I heard repeatedly to describe him, a fighter. The negative aspects of his character were assumed to be essential to that pugilism. Over time—and it wasn’t much—most of those on the right who had reservations about Trump made their peace with his flaws. Some even quietly celebrated them.

A year later I participated in an event at Stanford University with the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Hochschild spent five years immersed in a community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, then a Tea Party stronghold. What was important to understand about the rise of Trump, Hochschild told me during one of our offstage conversations, was that it was tied to feelings of being dishonored and humiliated. Trump supporters feel they have been disrespected; Trump is their response, she said, their antidepressant. Hochschild understood the power of emotion in politics, how reason is so often the slave of the passions. And the passions of people who feel unseen, who feel they have been treated with contempt, are destructive and dangerous.

[From the January/February 2019 issue: The real roots of American rage]

Since the Trump era began, we’ve seen a particularly toxic mix of passions on the right: fear and desperation, anger and indignation, feelings of betrayal and victimhood, all of which cry out for vengeance. Whether the nominee is DeSantis—who bills himself as a God-given “protector” and a “fighter”—or Trump, or someone else, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party will demand that the leader of the GOP seek vengeance in its name. Donald Trump has energized a movement and a propaganda infrastructure that will outlast him.

Vengeance is different from justice. The psychologist Leon F. Seltzer puts it this way: Revenge is predominantly emotional, while justice is primarily rational; revenge is, by nature, personal, while justice is impersonal and impartial; revenge is an act of vindictiveness, justice an act of vindication; revenge is about cycles, justice about closure; and revenge is about retaliation, whereas justice is about restoring balance.

“With revenge,” William Mikulas, a professor of psychology at the University of West Florida, told ABC News, “you are coming from an orientation of anger and violence or self-righteousness: ‘I want to get him, I want to hurt them … I want to make them pay.’ You’re coming from a place of violence and anger and that’s never good.”

Revenge creates a cycle of retaliation. It “keeps wounds green, which otherwise would heal,” in the words of Francis Bacon. Vengeance is insatiable, and in any society, over the long term, it can be deeply damaging. The desire for revenge reduces the capacity for legislators to work together across the aisle. It creates conditions in which demagogues can successfully peddle conspiracy theories and call for a “national divorce.” It leads Americans to see members of their opposing party as traitors. And exacting revenge tempts people to employ immoral and illegal methods—street violence, coups, insurrections—they would not otherwise contemplate. (The defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems revealed that a Fox producer texted Maria Bartiromo, a Fox news anchor, saying, “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.”)

White evangelical Christians have been a driving force in creating the politics of retribution and revenge—maybe the driving force. White evangelicals are among the GOP’s most loyal constituencies, and if they declared certain conduct off-limits, candidates and elected officials would comply. But no such signals were ever sent. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2020—after all the lies, misconduct, and deranged conspiracy theories we saw unfold during the Trump presidency—85 percent of white, evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attended religious services voted for Trump. Most of them became more, not less, tolerant of Trump’s misconduct over the course of his tenure.

Human emotions can be dominant and even determinative in distorting and deforming people’s judgments. Individuals who honestly believe that the Bible is authoritative in their lives—who insist that they cherish Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the pure in heart; turn the other cheek; love your enemies) and Paul’s admonition to put away anger, wrath, slander, and malice and replace them with compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, a spirit of forgiveness, and, above all, love, “which binds everything together in perfect harmony”—find themselves embracing political figures and a political ethic that are antithetical to these precepts. Many of those who claim in good faith that their Christian conscience required them to get passionately involved in politics have, upon doing so, discredited their Christian witness. Jesus has become a “hood ornament,” in the words of the theologian Russell Moore, in this case placed atop tribal and “culture war” politics.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

One recent example: Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Donald Trump who has made much of her Christian faith and worked for several different evangelical associations. “My mission is Truth, my God is the Lord Jesus Christ, and my client is the President of the United States,” she tweeted in 2020. But last week she admitted in a sworn statement that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Trump’s defeat—and she posted a video on Twitter mocking an injury from a fall that sent 81-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell to the hospital. (McConnell, although a Republican, has been a critic of Trump, earning the enmity of MAGA world.)

The antidote to the politics of retribution is the politics of forbearance. Forbearance is something of a neglected virtue; it is generally understood to mean patience and endurance, a willingness to show mercy and tolerance, making allowances for the faults of others, even forgiving those who offend you. Forbearance doesn’t mean avoiding or artificially minimizing disagreements; it means dealing with them with integrity and a measure of grace, free of vituperation.

None of us can perfectly personify forbearance, but all of us can do a little better, reflect a bit more on what kind of human beings and citizens we want to be, and take small steps toward greater integrity. We can ask ourselves: What, in this moment, is most needed from me and those in my political community, and perhaps even my faith community? Do we need more retribution and vengeance in our politics, or more reconciliation, greater understanding, and more fidelity to truth?

The greatest embodiment of the politics of forbearance was Abraham Lincoln. With a Civil War looming, he was still able to say, in his first inaugural address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have been strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Those bonds were broken; the war came. By the time it ended, more than 700,000 lives had been lost in a nation of 31 million. But the war was necessary; Lincoln preserved the Union and freed enslaved people. And somehow, through the entire ordeal, Lincoln was free of malice. He never allowed his heart to be corroded by enmity or detestation.   

In his 1917 biography of Lincoln, Lord Charnwood wrote, “This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South.”

Another Lincoln biographer, William Lee Miller, said of America’s 16th president, “He did not mark down the names of those who had not supported him, or nurse grudges, or hold resentments, or retaliate against ‘enemies’—indeed, he tried not to have enemies, not to ‘plant thorns.’” Lincoln’s previous failures did not leave scars or resentments, Miller says; he was an unusually generous human being, lacking in ruthlessness, disinclined to make himself feared, explicit in disavowing vengeance. Some believed he was too sympathetic to be a great leader. He turned out to be our greatest leader.

Lincoln was unique; we will never see his kind again. But the contrast between America’s first Republican president and its most recent Republican president is almost beyond comprehension. Each is the inverse of the other. One cannot revere Lincoln and embrace the political ethic of Trump, his many imitators, and the MAGA movement.

Sensibilities and dispositions can be shaped and reshaped; the “ancient trinity” of truth, beauty, and goodness can still inspire the human heart, even among cynics. The burning question for each of us is what we aspire to, for ourselves and for our leaders, and the kind of political culture we will help build. We are citizens, not subjects, and so it is within our power to write magnificent new chapters in the American story. But that requires letting go of hatred and vengeance and to be again touched, as we surely can be, by the better angels of our nature.