Climatologist Michael E Mann: 'Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes' | Climate change | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/.../feb/27/climatologist-michael-e-mann-doomism-climate-crisis-interview
(az na curackej kopanec do wikileaks dobrej rozhovor)
The youth climate movement has galvanised attention and re-centred the debate on intergenerational ethics. We are seeing a tipping point in public consciousness. That bodes well. There is still a viable way forward to avoid climate catastrophe.
You can see from the talking points of inactivists that they are really in retreat. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz have advised clients in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who carry water for them that you can’t get away with denying climate change any more. It doesn’t pass the sniff test with the public. Instead they are looking at other things they can do.
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Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies. Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don’t need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby’s motto, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, which is classic deflection. For a UK example look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs.
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Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.
What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair. But “too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science. Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.
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ad Bill Gates
YMLADRIS
His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation. If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions.
Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.
TADEAS,
TADEAS,
TADEAS