Emily Cunningham

For starters, this is a passive-voice construction hiding an overtly subjective and non-specific assessment of the odds of climate action. You see this all the time in American climate reporting.

Next, in a political context where opposition to climate action includes messaging not only that climate action is unneeded, but that it is impossible—too expensive, technically difficult, politically toxic, etc—this sort of odds making is far from politically neutral.

Climate journalism odds-making, in fact, reinforces a political stance taken by opponents of climate action. After all, if bold climate action is "highly unlikely," why should we make it a central debate in the halls of power, with so many other pressing issues at hand?

Next, I think these judgments are themselves suspect. I've been working on these issues for decades, and we've never seen a time when the politics of climate change are more obviously subject to big shifts, from accelerating technologies to the Carbon Bubble to green new deals.

I think it is simply impossible to predict what's going to happen on climate politics in even the relatively short term, much less over the course of the next few decades. Certainly, past experience is no useful guide.

But this is true in part because the very core of climate politics in America is cultural, and prediction is a cultural act, one which alters that which it predicts. What we believe about the shape of the future alters our actions in the present.

We've never had an honest discussion about this planetary crisis, in America. We should.https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1018861315237076992 …

(Indeed, we should be having more of a public debate about just how unpredictable our society's situation has become...)https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1088238823480320000 …