It's the NYT - https://archive.ph/48YXJ
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
An episode might include a visit to a floating village or a conversation about artificial intelligence with the musician Grimes.
Fuck me dead
These people go to $100k a year colleges and pay for their expensive lofts with drivel like this. I chose the wrong field.
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.
Anyone who calls themselves a philanthropist I automatically assume is a pedophile freak who deserves to be shot. Not a coincidence it sounds and spells similarly to “phrenologist”
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 actual empirical measurements of GHG content of the atmosphere continues to increase monotonically, and the effects of climate change get worse every month.
Increase monotonically?
We're in our 11th consecutive month of temperature record breaking worldwide
I think the only way the media would cover that if is Trump is asleep in the courtroom and jerks awake and out of nowhere he says "We're in our 11th consecutive month of temperature record breaking worldwide."
Increase monotonically?
It just keeps going up, never down. Even the emission reduction during COVID didn't change the overall trajectory. We're just lying to ourselves about getting it under control.
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?
Worth it if you get the opportunity to eat the NYTs editorial staff
Personally I'll prefer to be called a marauder of the outlands
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
I thought the same thing. I think a harbinger of what's coming will probably be something like Bill Gates getting a "ClimateHour" on MSNBC to say "We got this" while he backs that up with rose-colored glass stats and data. And the panel will nod in agreement. Maybe they have one person who is described as a "skeptic". Maybe the skeptic is even the butt of some mild jokes. Gates needs to be revered and his ass needs to be kissed. After all - he owns a significant chunk of the network.
Smiling and denialism plus "We got this" approval of climate engineering are arriving much faster than I expected. I figured a "ClimateHour" would be 5 years away at least. But now I wonder if it could even happen this year.
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.I am optimistic that apocalyptic global catastrophy will engender the sort of chaos under which decapitating capitalist goons is not out of the ordinary
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
In “Fallout,” the television adaptation of the popular video game that recently debuted on Amazon Prime Video, the apocalypse (nuclear, not climate-related) makes for a devastated earth, sundry mutants and plenty of goofy, kitschy fun — apocalypse lite.
"or, How I learned to stop worrying and love when everyone I know dies a slow, painful death."
Optimism does not come to me naturally, and I always found the insistence that it should deeply vexing
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