Thread by @Pinboard

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.