They seem to think that just because they’re the loudest, most publicly visible piece they are the most important piece in direct proportion to the noise they make. And that more noise at all times and places always improves things. And so we get plastic-straw-onomics.
Conversation
The war-scale urgency effort is in fact starting. Your life will start getting transformed in dramatic ways at the last-mile level in a few years as the action mature. Some changes you’ll notice (EVs on streets), others you won’t (renewables fraction increasing in your grid)
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The most useful thing you can do right now is neither futile virtue signaling shit like agitating to ban plastic straws, nor adding to the pressure-rhetoric noise. These fronts are way past diminishing returns to the extent they had utility at all. The real scarcity is elsewhere.
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There is *severe* shortage of technical and administrative talent *inside* of the growing scaled efforts:
- people who can craft and run wonky proposals for funding
- people who can solve renewables tech problems
- data science people who can investigate/analyze obscure details
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Every gig I’ve worked in this space, teams trying to do good work are starved of talent. You want someone who will tweet about plastic straws 24/7 you’ll get 1000 candidates. You want to get someone who can do lifecycle analysis or ML on emissions data, you’re in deep shit.
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The other thing people tend not to see is that ALL scenarios require this scale and urgency of action:
- with/without nuclear
- 2 deg or 4 deg
- market/state led
- low/high global cooperation
- cooperate/defect by big countries
They just differ in what you do, not scale/urgency
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The only 2 scenarios where you are fine with non-dramatic-non-scaled action are:
1. The skeptics turn out to have been right all along
2. Your preferred scenario is widespread collapse
Any other scenario requires urgent and scaled action on *some* front.
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In fact Trump actually tried to execute what can be read as a coherent climate plan. A scaled+urgent effort driven by what called avocado politics: brown(shirt) on inside, green on outside. If you’re an eco-fascist you’d do exactly what he did
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Look at what he tried to do:
- Close borders
- Accelerate fossil fuel use to get a bigger cut of the endgame gains
- Drive down trade
- Accelerate a pandemic that hits the outgroup hardest
Now THAT’S an urgent, scaled climate plan! Just not one humane people want.
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On climate skepticism. I live in the US and work with many powerful, smart people who happen to also be skeptics. Not all Trumpies.
Institutional experts have been wrong, corrupt, irreproducible etc a lot. Can’t just wave skeptics away when they control key levers.
What to do?
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Pragmatism calls for 2 attitude shifts:
1. Acknowledge there’s a chance they’re right. Small perhaps but not zero. That acknowledgment costs nothing unless you’re religious about it. Cost of non-skeptics being right and NOT acting is high enough you can/should Pascal’s wager it.
Replying to
2. Accept that many will end up doing what to you will seem like “the right thing for the wrong reason” like rationalizing and supporting climate action on other grounds (air quality say, or local problem management like wildfires or tech leadership national pride).
That’s fine.
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Adopt a “muddling through” mindset. This is a fundamentally NEW species-scale challenge with even best precedents being weak. There’s tons of uncertainty/ignorance. Dozens of possible good-faith, humane postures one could adopt. Read this, pace yourself: jstor.org/stable/973677?
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In the *best* case, we’re going to “muddle through” this thing with the “we” being a large, raucous, arguing, disagreeing subset of humanity (fortunately not all of humanity) driving through roughly right actions with frayed tempers, patience tried, and tenuously low consensus.
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I dislike (but will tolerate and work with) the “big tent” ideological model where climate gets overloaded into a social-justice-complete (SJ-complete?) problem spanning everything from gender wars to native rights to Mac-vs-PC and DCEU-vs-MCU.
But I’m big-tent on execution.
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Big-tent on execution means tens of 1000s will be solving hundreds of versions of similar problems in dozens of different ways, copying, pasting, screwing up etc etc. If we’re lucky it will be like the open-source world in many ways.
Don’t get religious about doing it your way.
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The only thing there’s no room for is bad-faith hostile action, aimed at either sabotaging good-faith action, or working by one of the inhumane playbook like avocado politics.
If you spot that within any serious effort, it’s fine to just treat them as enemy combatants.
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I mean... there will be plenty of time for the Mad Max avocado-politics games if good faith efforts fail.
Why cut straight to barbarism without giving humane action a chance?
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When Covid took off I had to explain the real threat wasn’t getting the disease but the system’s reaction to the hospitals blowing up, which would happen immediately.
The real threat of climate change is the reaction from three coastal Asian cities flooding simultaneously.

