Oh lord, @emorwee is speaking my heart here. heated.world/p/the-wheel-of…
Here's how it happens: a dude who has made a name for himself in some other field decides, "climate change is important, I need to look into it." He parachutes in, reads some sliver of the literature, talks to some sliver of people. And the result is always the same.
Not the same in that they come to the same conclusions, but the same in a few key ways: a) they conclude that what looks like a hopelessly tangled mess of social/tech/political/scientific issues...is in fact simple, and there's a simple answer that follows from some simple logic.
And b) implied by a, or sometimes made explicit, is the fact that environmentalists & other people who have been studying & working on this issue for decades are f'ing idiots who missed this obvious train of logic & deny the obvious solution because they're idiots.
The simple answer to the complex question varies from dude to dude. Often it's nuclear power (dudes love nuclear power). Sometimes it's tax÷nd. Sometimes it's doomer-style "the battle is already lost." But it's always *obvious* & greens are always *idiots* for missing it.
Or greens are not just idiots, but also Machiavellian schemers, secretly bought off my this or that shadowy force & serving some agenda other than climate -- maybe socialism, maybe neoliberalism, maybe Malthusian nihilism. Whatever, they're just *not what they appear*.
Like I said, the details differ, but the common thread is always that First-Time Climate Dude is brilliant, able to see things from a higher perspective than the poor benighted partisan greens, who are lost in groupthink.
In my experience, what happens to these Dudes is, the world fails to bow before their brilliance, greens refuse to adopt their slogans & keep pushing back with contrary information or priorities, and they ... get frustrated & bored. And go First-Time Dude some other area.
Stay in climate journalism long enough and, as Emily says, the Eternal Recurrence of First-Time Dudes becomes ... wearying.
