[Not the Onion] Climate Doom Is Out...

Ugh, this gets right to a massive pet peeve of mine regarding mainstream climate change coverage. This relentless fucking fixation on having hope, the absolute strident necessity that we all feel the "correct way" about what approaches us. It's toxic positivity. It's emotional policing.

All of these people are terrified of death and they have no idea what hope even is! Yelling at some teenager grieving the destruction of the biosphere, "Be more optimistic! Look at the cool tech!" - it's not just ineffective, it's the literal opposite of helpful.

Hope isn't optimism! Hope isn't believing that we will win. Hope is when you've gone fully into despair and then find yourself, somehow, still alive there. This facade of positivity they call hope will break at the first sign of stress; that's why they push it so hard, insisting we all perform optimism as well, propping up their fragile feelings for them. I just want to shout it in their faces: You can't have hope without death! You can't have peace without grieving! Fuck you, start weeping!

Focusing on disaster hasn't changed the planet's trajectory. Will a more upbeat approach show the way forward?

this is the most idealist baby-brained shit ever written. change the mode of production? no, you just didn't center your chakras while creating your vision board

Permanently Deleted

I knew it was a waste of time but I decided I'd actually read the article. But by the fourth word I knew it was a loser.

The philanthropist Kathryn Murdoch has prioritized donations to environmental causes for more than a decade.

Yes, she's one of those Murdochs. She's Rupert Murdoch's daughter-in-law.

I am going to eat the NYT's editorial staff.

The worst part about this is that all this positivity is coming from absolutely delusional metrics. There have been a bunch of "look how much our per capita GHG emissions have declined in the last decade" figures floating around social media recently, and they're totally untethered from reality. Most of these projections are based on taking emissions offset programs at face value--based, that is, on assuming that all the companies claims of "net zero" on the basis of planting trees or other offset programs really have reduced their emissions by the amount claimed.

Unfortunately, virtually every single one of those programs is bullshit. Carbon offsets are uniquely susceptible to grifting because they have a really fucked up incentive structure that encourages everyone involved to either lie or look the other way about lies. Because of the complexity associated with monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of these programs, we mostly rely on offset programs to self-report their work, and then "spot check" MRV compliance. Companies have an obvious incentive to lie here: playing up (or outright fabricating) their offset work lets them charge more and, in places with things like cap & trade policies in place, make even more money selling carbon credits.

What's less obvious is that regulatory bodies also have an incentive to lie about MRV success. The relevant contrast case is tax evasion. Even if I have an incentive to lie about my taxes in order to get away with paying less, the government (at least in theory) has an incentive to catch and stop me, since every dollar of tax liability I avoid is a dollar they don't get: it's a zero-sum game. MRV evasion isn't like that. Instead of having an incentive to catch me, regulatory bodies also have an incentive to lie, or at least to not work very hard at trying to catch me lying. If the government lets (say) ExxonMobil get away with claiming more effective (or real) offsets than they actually implemented, they're not losing anything. In fact, they actually come out ahead: they get to claim that companies in their control are meeting their legal and treaty-based obligations, which is a huge diplomatic and PR win.

The end result of this is that official GHG emissions estimates have come totally untethered from reality. Governments are touting reports and projections showing how much better we're all doing, and how on track we are to solve this problem. Meanwhile, the actual empirical measurements of GHG content of the atmosphere continues to increase monotonically, and the effects of climate change get worse every month. We're in our 11th consecutive month of temperature record breaking worldwide, but everyone is telling us to be optimistic. This looks super puzzling until you realize that it's all just based on the big lie of carbon offsets that we're all telling ourselves and each other. We're going to grift ourselves right into the apocalypse.

The IPCC already tried "Apocalyptic Optimism" when it downplayed likely outcomes for climate change hoping that making it seem like there was more time would spur govts into action rather that nihilism. It turns out that capitalism is incapable of dealing with medium and long term issues if doing so affects the bottom line. Who could've known?

Cant wait to become a cannibal raider

It's begun! I wondered what this stage of denialism and gaslight would look like, and i gotta say i didn't think they'd try threading hope back into the narrative so quickly

we maybe laterrd so much we can't fix it anymore so embrace the suck and get back to brunch sweetie. Time to be a grown up and accept you don't get all the things you want in life. Besides did the most progressive thing and pragmatically acknowledged climate change while spending less than what climate enhanced storms damage us. So thats what you get. Now on to $1.5 trillion in blpwing up the world like a Presidetial adult does.

How about someone shanks the author and when dooming about the terminal blood loss doesn't work they can try to find an upbeat approach out of it

I am optimistic that apocalyptic global catastrophy will engender the sort of chaos under which decapitating capitalist goons is not out of the ordinary

Wow this writer really liked the Fallout show huh?

Optimism does not come to me naturally, and I always found the insistence that it should deeply vexing

Edit: Fucking liberals.

posadist nyt lmao

Death to America

I am also an apocalyptic optimist

if China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea join forces to [redacted] then we can have a final solution to global warming!

Sure, I have “apocalyptic optimism” that as things get even more dire we’ll be able to kill you fucks and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.

"Don't worry, we've got it. Just trust in the market!"

• 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, 2024

Red skies burning bright

It's another dark day's night

Just a prayer to bloody sacrament

Of everything all right

• Rusty Cage, "The Grave"

I have a feeling that no one here has read the full article. The most I have seen is "by the fourth word I knew it was a loser".

While most of the article is indeed dedicated to "works [that] tend to be of the techno-futurist variety", a significant portion of the article is dedicated to voices ciritical of this type of optimism:

To emphasize a cheerier one, examples tend to be cherry picked or gently massaged. A section in Ritchie’s book argues, correctly, that deaths from extreme weather events are fewer than they were in the past. But this section all but ignores the fact that extreme weather events are becoming more severe and more frequent, a trend that will continue even if harmful emissions are slowed. And it ignores any deaths from extreme heat, which Ritchie attributed, in conversation, to the insufficiency of the data.

The journalist Jeff Goodell has studied that data. The title of his recent book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” suggests a more sober perspective. (In conversation, he described himself as broadly bullish about the climate crisis, which came as a surprise.) He wanted to use his storytelling, he said, not necessarily to inspire hope or even anger, but to communicate what the planet faces. “Because you can’t talk about solutions until you understand the scope and scale,” he said. He is also skeptical, he said, of much of the sunny, solutions-minded messaging.

“It makes it feel like climate change is like a broken leg, “ he said. “With a broken leg, you’re in a cast for six or eight weeks. You suffer some pain, then you go back into your old life.” He doesn’t believe that’s the case here.

“We’re not going to fix this,” he said. “It’s going to be how do we manage to live in this new world.”

Another excerpt:

Can a better future arrive without political intervention? Fisher doesn’t think so. Her book, “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action,” which she describes as a “data driven manifesto,” posits a world in which climate shocks become so great that they spur mass protest and force government and industry to transition to clean energy. “It’s the most realistically hopeful way to think about where we get to the other side of the climate crisis,” she said.

That realism imagines a future of food scarcity, water scarcity, climate-spurred migration and increasing incidences of extreme weather. Fisher also predicts some level of mass death. “There’s no question that there are going to be lives lost,” she said. “Already lives are being lost.” Which may not sound especially optimistic. But Fisher’s research has taught her to believe in, as she terms it, “people power.” She has found that people who have had a visceral experience of climate change are more likely to be angry and active rather than doomy and depressed.

“The whole point of apocalyptic optimism is being optimistic in a way that actually helps get us somewhere,” she said. “It’s not shiny and rosy and like cotton candy. It’s a bitter pill. But here we are and we can still do something.” In this sense, hope is a spur, a prod, an uncomfortable goad. And imagining a better future is a brave and even necessary act.

My takeaway is that it does try to investigate the question at least, and not as an endorsement of that "techno-futurist" optimism. But more than anything, it pulls up different voices and then does the whole "who knows who is right?" that is so prevalent in Western journalism trying to be neutral.

I feel like people in this instance are jumping to conclusions based off first impressions and presumptions. Presumptions that happened to be incorrect this time. This may come across as me defending the NYT as a whole to some, which isn't my intention. I just find it disappointing when people are making points that are brought up in the article itself and those are made by all the others as well. No one has talked about the critical voices mentioned, and how right or wrong they are, which could be an interesting discussion. Instead people are all rehashing the familiar talking points against the techno-optimism stuff (which are valid!), and it all feels kinda stale.