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23 Sep, 13 tweets, 3 min read
One politically difficult fact about climate change is that based on IPCC models, the next 10 years look the same whether we make massive cuts in emissions or increase emissions. Climate outcomes only diverge decades after the economic impacts of trying to reduce emissions hit.
This is one reason I argue the current "climate emergency" framing popular among educated liberals is harmful. When you have an emergency, but nothing you can do can affect the situation for years, the outcome will be backlash. We just saw this with covid on shorter time scales.
Instead of giving us a pathway to mitigating climate change, climate alarmism instead becomes an expression of righteousness and civic identity, which drops it right into the meatgrinder of media-driven polarization. Nothing could better guarantee failure cnn.com/2021/09/15/ent…
The "climate emergency" framing undermines a real victory in this space, which is that old school climate denialism is dying out because it is untenable. The last thing we need to do is replace it with a new kind of politically supercharged denialism based on what tribe you're in
The situation we want is one where Team A is demanding climate mitigation through a socialist kumbayah Green New Deal (or whatever), while Team B demands mitigation through private sector gold rush electrification with American eagles soaring overhead (or whatever)
In other words, *depoliticizing* the goal of climate mitigation entirely, while having our big political fights over which pathway to follow. Instead, we have a situation where one side pompously and ineffectively claims to save the planet, so the other side gives them the finger
The first step in backing down from this is accepting that nothing we do, good or bad, can have an impact on climate this decade, and that long-term solutions that do work require retreating from the hair-on-fire approach and aligning short-term incentives with longer-term goals.
I keep coming back to my experience in western Iowa, watching far-right farmers lay into their far-right congressman at a town hall because Trump was making it less profitable to put wind turbines on their land. Nix Samantha Bee and find ways to make people rich from reducing CO2
The other urgent need is finding ways to shut down the polarization engine. We're in a pandemic where supporting or opposing an objectively safe and effective vaccine against a dangerous respiratory virus has become a mark of political affiliation. How is there hope for climate?
Climate change is stochastic, it happens over the long term, its effects are indirect, the modeling is uncertain, the science is not settled and potential solutions all require rebuilding industrial society. In every way it's a harder collective action problem than the pandemic.
If we've arrived at a point where democratic countries can't organize an effective response to a respiratory virus, there's no hope at all of ameliorating climate, and we should prepare individually for the worst outcome until we can find a way to fix the governance problem.
Someone asked for examples of politically salient issues that are not divided for/against on party lines. I'd say we want climate policy to be like antiterrorism or US support for Israel, where the two parties pursue identical policies and fight over who is not being tough enough
The idea is to make climate mitigation an untouchable third rail of American politics like military spending or social security, that each team can accuse the other side of subverting. Right now it's more on track to become a partisan litmus test issue like guns or abortion.

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More from @Pinboard

24 Sep
Biden is now throwing his own border patrol staff under the bus for enforcing his border policy. politico.com/news/2021/09/2…
The pattern with Biden on immigration has been one of constant mendacity—whether it's lying to himself or to us isn't clear. He lied about the (nonexistent) legal barriers to processing SIV applications stateside, he lied about undoing Trump policies, now he's lying about Haiti.
In this case, first they went after the horses, and now they're going after the border agents who were riding them. But the people responsible are those who have set this policy, not the people who are being made to enforce it. Who knew Biden could out-lie Trump on immigration?
Read 4 tweets
23 Sep
This claim is such a profound misunderstanding of how corporate campaign finance works. For one thing, the money goes to the campaign, not the senator personally, and for another, not a single incumbent senator has any difficulty fundraising these days.
The article mentions that Sinema has raised $923,065 from various nefarious interest groups, which is approximately 5% of her 2018 campaign budget. She could flip all of her political positions and raise the same funds from PACs and corporations that back the other stance.
Make no mistake, the current system of campaign funding and PACs is institutionalized corruption. But the idea that senators are somehow beholden to their $5,000 corporate donors is ridiculous and obscures the real way power and influence flow in Washington.
Read 5 tweets
22 Sep
The Carrington Event in 1859 is a scary geomagnetic storm that would probably take out the GPS system and large parts of the power grid if it happened today. But evidence is mounting that it's small on the scale of potential solar flares to worry about knowablemagazine.org/article/physic…
There are signs in tree rings and ice cores that the Sun really roasted us in 994, 775, 660 BC and on earlier occasions. The 1859 size events probably happen on the order of 2-3 times a century, but (just like with California earthquakes this century) we've been unusually lucky.
If you've followed me a long time, you know my fascination with predictable natural disasters that are just rare enough to be outside living memory. A satellite-roasting solar flare is a 100% certainty, but imagine a world that can't even fight covid successfully planning for it.
Read 6 tweets
22 Sep
If Democrats were committed to breaking Congressional deadlock they would hold the defense authorization bill, and not their own agenda, as a hostage. But it's going to sail through Congress like it always does.
We live in a country where defaulting on the public debt is normal political brinksmanship, but withholding military spending is unthinkable.
The Democrats could also kill the debt ceiling drama dead tonight by using the coin trick (the treasury has the legal power to mint platinum coins of arbitrary value). But the party, unlike their more creative opponents, appears incapable of *using* power while they have it.
Read 7 tweets
21 Sep
Google's FEC filing is in, and as always full of interest. On August 21, the company made a $1000 donation to Iowa rep Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Less than a month later, Miller-Meeks was here on Twitter spreading disinformation on vaccine policy (despite being a medical doctor)
The National Right to Life Committee gave West Virginia congressman David McKinley a 100% rating on abortion issues from 2011 to the present, and Google gave his campaign $2,500 on August 13.
On August 13, Google made a $5,000 donation to Abraham Lincoln PAC, twenty of whose 2020 recipients voted to overturn the results of the presidential election.
Read 13 tweets
21 Sep
Here's more information for the White House: the guy on the right works for Biden, and the men on the left are refugees Biden is deporting under fast-track public health authority he inherited from Trump that denies them a chance to file an asylum claim. cnn.com/2021/09/20/pol…
The pretense where Biden and his government are repeatedly shocked, shocked at the uncomfortable imagery of their policy decisions at the southern border or in evacuating visa applicants from Afghanistan adds insult to injury. At least Trump stood up for his nativist xenophobia.
Perhaps on Biden's watch we'll get a push to make sure more women and agents of color are whipping Haitians on horseback. But the substance of this Administration's attitude towards migrants, refugees, and undocumented Americans is pure MAGA.
Read 4 tweets

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