India, May 2 -- Every summer, India gets hotter. We speak of the heat the way we speak of traffic: as an ambient condition, unfortunate but accepted, something to be endured rather than examined. What we have not seriously asked is where the heat is coming from, and whether the answer implicates us more directly than we are willing to admit.

This April, nearly every city on the list of the worlds hundred hottest was Indian. Varanasi is burning at forty-four degrees. Prayagraj, which we call a seat of the divine, is a furnace. We call these cities Dev Bhoomi, sacred ground. What we do not ask is what it means that the sacred ground is on fire, and who precisely lit the match.

The standard account of why the planet is heating runs through...