I wonder how many conservatives are exploring climate strategy on the DL. Like are there secret clubs in DC where flag-pin dudes huddle by the bar and whisper about climate sensitivity, replacement-cost solar, non-rare-earth batteries, and ruggedizing for complex threshold risks?
Meanwhile, across the pond,
"Climate change is now the most important issue, according to the British public..."
You should immediately mistrust any linear projection of positive climate impact, such as "Alaskan agriculture will benefit from warming temperatures."
First, tho models are improving, there's always the chance that specific, long-term local impacts may work out differently than expected, for complex reasons.
"Our model indicates temperatures will rise" is different that knowing, for sure, that temperatures will rise steadily.
Second, variability is at least as important as trend. If nine years out of ten there are warmer conditions, but the other year there are unprecedented and catastrophic floods, the net result is not a gain for farmers.
This is a fine piece of climate journalism, focusing on efforts to hoard the future by buying up supplies of cobalt, a mineral critical for making a number of low-carbon technologies.
Amos Hochstein, State Department senior adviser for global energy security, calls access to solar panels & EV batteries "a national security imperative."
Right now, we see a real appetite for what I call safe utopias — fantasies where the planetary crisis is so successfully addressed that continuity is restored, and zero-sum conflicts over the pace of change become irrelevant.
But this is no utopia, and nothing about this situation is safe.
Imagination is powerful, and necessary, but imagining possibilities arising from a world where we aren't, and then treating our visions as anticipations of our options in this actual world is dangerous and deluded.
The climate mov't should be having a scathing self-examination about whether the strategic assumptions, organizational cultures and ideological assertions guiding climate activism work — or are part of the problem.
I see 0% chance that will happen.
We'll see how many people have the courage to even retweet this idea.
I'm hearing/seeing/reading so many urgent demands that the climate movement be exactly what it's always been, but more so!
It's like the old generals saying, after the Somme—after a million dead—that all we need is the right *kind* of frontal assault, with the proper spirit...