You think this piece is bad? Check out its primary source for the claim that the world won't be rendered uninhabitable.
But if climate change is in fact like an asteroid zooming toward the earth, you wouldn’t know it from the actions and prescriptions of those who hold this view. The Green New Deal remains more slogan than policy proposal. But based on what little its proponents have said, it seems unlikely that anyone is actually seriously proposing the sort of draconian measures that a true climate emergency would ostensibly demand.
Green New Deal proponents appear to have no plans to ban meat or air travel, as some right-wing critics have suggested. Many reject nuclear energy and carbon capture technology, despite strong evidence that both will be necessary to deeply cut global emissions.
What climate catastrophists are actually willing to propose are the sorts of things you do in response to planetary diabetes, not a climate asteroid. After spilling several thousand words about why alarmism about looming climate catastrophe was warranted in a New York Times Sunday Review article entitled “Time to Panic,” Wallace Wells could only offer higher fuel efficiency standards, high speed rail, and mandatory requirements to feed cattle seaweed as the path forward. This is hardly the stuff of asteroids and emergencies.
What climate hawks and Green New Deal advocates actually have in mind is politics, not the suspension of politics in the face of looming catastrophe. The talk of climate apocalypse is in service of long-standing policy goals, not an all hands on deck response to a climate emergency.
For these reasons, staking out a more catastrophist and progressive position in Congress is unlikely to either raise the ambitions of climate policy or improve its prospects of passage. Getting enough of the political spectrum to have sufficient climate ambition to avoid, under the best of circumstances, the watered-down fate of climate policy efforts during the Obama years will require something different: namely, demonstrating that the environmental movement is something more than an ideological special interest.
Doing so will require environmentalists to stop imploring Americans to bear down and take their environmental medicine and, instead, to swallow hard and take some hard medicine themselves, by embracing things that they have historically found distasteful, such as adaptation, natural gas, carbon capture, and nuclear energy.
That won’t get the United States — much less the rest of the world — to zero emissions in the next 12 years. But Wallace Wells is right that by almost every measure, a two-degree future will be better than a three-degree future and a three-degree future better than a four-degree future. Moreover, practically, nothing that Green New Deal advocates appear willing to seriously propose will actually cut US emissions at a scale or pace consistent with stabilizing emissions below two degrees, much less 1.5. Making the best of our chronic condition, rather, will require a climate movement that is less catastrophist about the problem and more ecumenical about its solutions.
Moreover, practically, nothing that Green New Deal advocates appear willing to seriously propose will actually cut US emissions at a scale or pace consistent with stabilizing emissions below two degrees
If they want climate Stalin I'll fucking give them climate Stalin
Wait, so it sounds like she's saying "The GND and liberal politicians aren't actually treating this like an existential threat"... which I agree with! But then she says, because they're not, it isn't a threat? Fucking lol.
I mean in some sense I agree, there is no political solution to climate change under capitalism and the GND won't do it, but the answer to that is socialism...
It's a separate piece by a couple of obnoxious neolib white guys. Here's the relevant bit:
The problem for the climate movement is that the technocratic requirements necessary to massively decarbonize the global economy conflict with the egalitarian catastrophism that the movement’s mobilization strategies demand. McKibben has privately acknowledged as much to several people, explaining that he hasn’t publicly recognized the need for nuclear energy because he believes doing so would “split this movement in half.”
Implicit in these sorts of political calculations is the assumption that once advocates have amassed sufficient political power, the necessary concessions to the practical exigencies of deeply reducing carbon emissions will then become possible. But the army you raise ultimately shapes the sorts of battles you are able to wage, and it is not clear that the army of egalitarian millenarians that the climate movement is mobilizing will be willing to sign on to the necessary compromises — politically, economically, and technologically — that would be necessary to actually address the problem. Anyone who doubts this need only direct their gaze toward the other side of the political spectrum, where conservatives and Republicans are now entirely captive to the nativist forces they have unleashed over the last decade in their battles with Obama-era progressives.
And:
Under the best of circumstances, with a Democratic president and Congress after 2020, environmentalists will be faced with a Democratic coalition dependent on vulnerable members representing swing states that share neither progressives’ enthusiasm for redistributive social programs nor environmentalists’ fear of climate change. This is the reason that senior Democratic members of Congress, such as Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, have been so tepid about the Green New Deal. They have both, twice during the course of their careers in Congress, watched Democrats lose control of both houses of Congress after proposing major climate and health care legislation.
Meanwhile, the polarizing catastrophism of the environmental left — tied to “this changes everything” demands for 100 percent renewables, mandatory vegetarianism, and the end of extractivism and capitalism — has virtually excised moderate and explicit climate policy as an option for Republicans, a problem that will likely be exacerbated in the event of another wave election favoring Democrats. Already, several of the most prominent Republicans still willing to acknowledge climate change lost their seats in 2018. Those remaining are likely to be high on Democratic target lists in 2020 for the simple reason that Republican districts that can presently sustain some level of climate policy advocacy are also districts that Democrats have a shot at representing.
You think this piece is bad? Check out its primary source for the claim that the world won't be rendered uninhabitable.
:agony-acid: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
:agony-immense: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
:agony-limitless:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
If they want climate Stalin I'll fucking give them climate Stalin
:stalin-shining:
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We're gonna need the newest spoon technology for this :amerikkka: 🥄🥄🥄 :stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2:
Wait, so it sounds like she's saying "The GND and liberal politicians aren't actually treating this like an existential threat"... which I agree with! But then she says, because they're not, it isn't a threat? Fucking lol.
I mean in some sense I agree, there is no political solution to climate change under capitalism and the GND won't do it, but the answer to that is socialism...
It's a separate piece by a couple of obnoxious neolib white guys. Here's the relevant bit:
And: