Thread by @atrembath

This tweet does a great job capturing an extremely widespread theory of change on the part of climate activists and science communicators. It also contains a cascade of false premises, broken logic, and unrealistic expectations.

Thread:

https://twitter.com/ClimateHuman/status/1571879064985632771

Losses from climate change have yet to outpace gains from economic growth and reduced vulnerability from improving infrastructure.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Disasters are getting more intense, but very unevenly.

Temperature events are intensifying, but the global trend in hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tornados are flatter.

rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/global-disas…

As @TheBTI's @PatrickTBrown31 has explained, climate change is absolutely making heat waves and wildfire conditions worse. But academics and media use metrics that deliberately exaggerate the effect:

thebreakthrough.org/blog/effective…

Anthropogenic climate change has and will continue to cause significant damage, which is reason enough to advance policies that accelerate decarbonization and improve human resilience to weather and extremes.

But this is not exactly the stuff of civilizational collapse.

"Emergency" is simply the wrong posture for an emergent global phenomenon that we will spend our lifetimes responding to.

slate.com/technology/201…

Regardless of the specifics, shouldn't we expect media coverage of climate disasters to "wake" the public up so they demand action?

Not really. "Warming noticed by the general public may not be clearly distinguishable from zero over the 21st century."

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

I experience this anecdotally. The recent change in wildfire conditions in NorCal, which climate change has contributed to, has made life viscerally more shitty for days or weeks on end. But they haven't exactly caused us to attempt the overthrow of industrial capitalism.

Like it or not, humans acclimate fairly quickly to the much-maligned "new normal."

This is good, as when societies become more resilient to extremes and disasters, and bad, as when it breeds resignation.

Will attacking the social license of the fossil fuel industry prompt public backlash and demand for change?*

Well, after a decade of #ExxonKnew and #divestment, amidst widespread coverage of wildfires and hurricanes, fossil fuel profits...reached record highs.

*Also, what "change" means is never convincingly spelled out in these imaginaries.

All told, the theory that widespread media coverage of climate disasters and fossil industry villainy will cause popular public demands for...something?...falls apart at basically every level.

My skepticism of this theory of change is often read as pessimism, but it isn't. The story of climate action and decarbonization is largely one of good news.

Carbon emissions are near peak globally and have peaked in every rich country around the world. Losses/mortality from weather and disasters are declining despite more wealth "in harm's way." Low-carbon technologies and infrastructure are increasingly affordable and scalable.

Much work remains. The bulk of carbon emissions have no affordable, scalable low-carbon alternatives at the moment, at least before we electrify much more of the energy economy. We haven't figured out how to regulate/permit in an abundant, low-carbon future.

Most of the world remains poor by Western standards. Vulnerability to weather/extremes remains unacceptably high. Access to resilient infrastructure and technology is unequally distributed, and often constrained by ideological institutions in the wealthy world.

Agriculture in particular lacks scalable low-carbon alternatives to the major sources of emissions: continuing land-used change from extensive production, fertilizers production, and enteric methane.

thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-ag…

This has led us @TheBTI to what we see as more generative, logical theories of change:

Make clean energy cheap.

Grow more food on less land.

Deregulate abundance.

Don't pull the ladder up behind you.

/fin

thebreakthrough.org