These windows of opportunity keep getting shorter, and the requirements more fantastical, but this Cassandra mode of climate journalism will continue. Emissions got nowhere near zero even at the peak of the covid shutdown. This is a call for absolutely radical, impossible changehttps://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1424668961308909580 …
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I am critical of this mode of covering climate because I find it paralyzing and totalizing. Even a World War II scale transformation in the global economy, in a context of complete international agreement and cooperation, would not be enough to get to zero net emissions.
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What we need instead is a climate version of the Serenity Poem. God grant us the courage to electrify the things we can, the serenity to accept emissions from the things we can't, and the wisdom to pursue carbon sequestration and geoengineering projects that make a difference.
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The current Whole Foods mentality where we pretend that flying less, being mindful about meat in our diet, and telling large areas of Asia and Africa to stay poor for the sake of the planet's health will solve climate change, is not a viable model for how to get out of this mess.
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Since people ask, one approach I really like is to aggressively fight air pollution, whose impacts on public health are immeasurably greater than climate change. The changes needed to fight it (moving to renewables and nuclear energy) are congruent with reducing CO2 emissions.
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The more general principle is to look for ways to align climate mitigations with tangible improvements in people's daily life, whether through cheaper power, clean air, or the ability to get incredibly prosperous inventing and manufacturing stuff that gets us to global cooling.
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If there's no pathway to global carbon sequestration trillionaires who we can all hate on for being selfish plutocrats who only cooled the planet on the backs of the working man, then we're doing it wrong.
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Covid gave us a glimpse of a world without air pollution, and we should act on that opportunity while it remains in living memory. People liked it; sell them on more of it!
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The other place where climate journalism is not being honest is the promise that prompt action can still have an effect. We've been really rolling the dice and it's quite possible that some methane/permafrost runaway or deep ocean thing or other feedback cycle is irreversible.
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Replying to @Pinboard
It's already too late for us, I guess. We can but hope the few extremophiles that will feed on the anoxic bodies of our offspring will in some way do something about it instead.
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That's the kind of gloominess I'm hoping to avoid here!
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Replying to @Pinboard
if we can't make a handful of companies stop poisoning every body of water because that's entirely too hard then maybe it's not gloominess as much as basic realism tho
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Replying to @otrahuevada @Pinboard
We've fucked the water, the soil and the skies. Maybe worshipping unbrindled growth on top of a finite planet wasn't such a great idea? It did make a handful of people pornographically rich so it might have been worth it for the lols
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