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Doctor Memory's avatar

“Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked.”

My instinct is that it’s actually worse than this. A message that doesn’t work simply disappears without a trace. But I think that “raising awareness” of climate change has been pretty effective: a lot of people agree that there’s a huge problem and that we should probably do something dramatic about it.

The problem is that there’s no particular agreement on _what_ should be done and frankly the better technocratic solutions in no way flow as an obvious narrative from a basic statement of the problem: bluntly no one tends to think that a real crisis gets solved by a complicated tax regime.

What I think has happened instead is a huge own goal for the left: a gift of energy and motivation to a sort of lay Malthusian instinct that found instant common cause with anti-immigrant know-nothings and what I with tongue only slightly in cheek like to call “left-bourgeois pastoralism” — bluntly if you tell people that a disaster is incoming but all of your plans to head it off sound like egghead nonsense, they’ll decide that the sensible thing to do is pull up the drawbridges, fill the moats and ride out the storm. You could see this pretty clearly in Berkeley, where for years the appointed head of city planning argued vehemently that building any new housing was in contravention to the UN’s climate goals. (Yes really.)

So yes, I’m basically with Matt on the virtue of quietness here: an environmental movement that had focused on the obvious and terrible human health effects of most things that cause carbon emissions would probably be in a much better shape today with far fewer unwanted side effects.

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Jeff Rigsby's avatar

Matt shouldn't call himself an asshole for (often) favoring the quiet strategy, or claim he's not a total asshole because sometimes he doesn't. If anything I would expect the loud strategy to attract a higher percentage of awful people than the quiet one, independently of which one is more likely to be effective.

Don't let the screamers choose the framing!

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