Conversation

Replying to
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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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.
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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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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.
Replying to
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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