Thread by @Pinboard

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 change

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1424668961308909580

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

In such a world, even negative net emissions (a complete fantasy) would do nothing to alleviate warming on human time scales. Climate is not a morality play about human hubris; covering it like that leaves people paralyzed and scared. We should be feeling inventive and scared!

We're also overlooking that the good Lord gave us a whole backup continent just for this eventuality. Let's tap the brakes on escaping to Mars and figure out where the best sight lines for a condo will be once the ice melts

But whether you agree with me on climate or not, I ask you to adopt the lesson we got from covid: with an effective and cheap solution in hand, and millions of lives at stake, we couldn't solve a collective action problem that was orders of magnitude easier than climate change.

The world of token measures where half of California is on fire but I'm not allowed to buy a gas stove in Berkeley is not the one I want to live in.

The long lag time with climate impacts means that even if humanity disappeared tonight, we'd have decades of heating ahead of us. So no matter what policies we adopt, "the world is burning!" climate journalism has a bright future. Every year the hot takes will get hotter.

This is the kind of climate coverage I find vexing. It's like constantly telling someone "get scared—you have incurable cancer!" instead of talking about what it means in practical terms, letting the patient know what to expect, and helping them learn to live in this new reality

Apocalyptic climate coverage is only going to encourage denialism and apathy, as well as a backlash once people notice that their lives go on pretty much as before in a warming world. We have a chance to get this right and channel people's alarm in a more constructive direction.