Agree with David Wallace-Wells that anyone who sees a world of 3 degrees warming — or even 2.5 degrees — as a positive or happy outcome has a pretty grotesque, or at least deluded, perspective on human suffering. And with you that 2.7C is a lot less bad than 4.4C; that every tenth of a degree of avoided warming matters; and that despair-inducing doom-scrolling is not a good strategy for achieving the change we need. The subject of the NYT story you mentioned did say she compares her fears about our warming planet to someone with a fear of flying who learns to manage their fear well enough to fly, which sounds constructive to me.
> The prediction is something that I actually think is more likely than not to happen. With the warning, in this case, I am being hand-wavy about the actual probability (because I sincerely have no idea) but I’m trying to scare you a bit with a plausible small-probability catastrophe.
You could also frame this (a little more statistically rigorously) as this being the difference between an unconditional prediction (what will happen) vs. a conditional prediction (what could happen, given some state of the world we may not enter).
Also, I don't think there is any reason to expect climate events to be normally distributed. Like, your point about ratios in tails still stands, but if Taleb reads this ur in trouble m8.
I really liked this piece. Will be sharing it. In fact I liked it so much that I scrolled the comments- all of them. Maybe it’s the topic, maybe it’s Matt’s take but do other early subscribers find it’s got a bit angry here at times, lately. Used be a lot more civil, informative and thought-provoking. Would it be possible to have an ignore/hide/mute function for the commenters? I don’t want to stop anyone from posting their $8 of hate — I just don’t want to scroll through it to get to the posts I find more engaging.
On the substance, I haven’t encountered clinical “climate anxiety” but I do see three behaviors that I worry may be counterproductive as we work collectively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. First, overuse of scare tactics as indicated in Matt’s article. Not just by click-harvesting media, but by activists and green groups. Second, attribution of every undesirable or “disliked by me” environmental change to climate change: e.g. plastic bag litter, intensive farming runoff, pollinators population collapse, PFAS pollution. Third, excessive focus on energy conservation, anti-consumerism and de-industrialization as key strategies to get to net-zero.
I took Matt's advice and called my members of Congress to ask them to support the Apollo Act. It took about five minutes to call both my senators and my House rep.
I'd encourage everyone to take 10 minutes and program your MOC phone numbers into your own phone. Then, whenever they do something that annoys you, you can leave a message to complain. If, say, they start getting a bunch of calls about masking in schools, they do listen.
This is one of the most important points: "If you’re worried about other people’s impact on the climate, you need to push for policy changes that make it easier for them to do what they want to do in an ecologically sustainable way or else that outright ban them from doing something destructive." The best way to fight climate change is to lower the environmental footprint of stuff people do rather than drastically change society. You're certainly going to get less of a fight.
Cars are a significant source of greenhouse gas emission. The answer is to make cars that are either have very low emissions, or even better, zero emissions. Insisting we need to ban cars, or that we should increase public transit instead of going for zero emission cars isn't going to convince anyone.
Similarly, it's very popular to complain about McMansions' large carbon footprint. A lot of that complaining seems to come from people who think McMansions are tacky and overall awful. The aesthetic virtues of a McMansion are separate from the carbon footprint, but the two are often conflated. I'd rather have tons of really tacky McMansions that are carbon neutral than more tasteful housing that has a big carbon footprint.
I've somehow finally put together a few ideas in metaethics that I'd seen bumping around but didn't realize how they're connected. Some people think that actions or attitudes are right or wrong insofar as they are "fitting" to the cause. Others think that actions or attitudes are right or wrong insofar as they lead to desired outcomes. I'm personally a skeptic about such a "fittingness" concept, but if you think it's right and good to have the emotional state about climate change that is fitting, then maybe you think anxiety is right and good, even if it's counterproductive.
(In my professional life I'm usually thinking about this more in epistemic contexts - some people think that certain types of belief are fitting to your evidence, while I just care if a belief-formation strategy tends to yield quantities of truths that are relevant to one's interests, whether or not they "fit" the evidence.)
It's crazy that the framing here is "oh, why are people so down on the climate future???" without mentioning that oil companies & orgs have very intentionally sown climate anxiety, despair, and hopelessness:
Also, the framing of temp. rise as a linear relationship is a fallacy.
If you buy that climate change was a major contributor to the Syrian refugee, and those 10+ million destabilized politics throughout Europe, it's not unreasonable to expect that the 150 million climate refugees (very conservatively) anticipated by 2050 will be substantially more geopolitically destabilizing.
It’s a strong indication that political punditry on Substack is more rational and evenhanded when on back-to-back days I can comment-rant at Jonah Goldberg of (conservative-leaning) The Dispatch and Matt for the exact same thing. That’s progress!
Now for the rant: It wasn’t Liberals anxious about the environment who gutted the EPA, forcing the resignations of many of its most competent employees (some of whom are good personal friends of mine, giving me unique insight into Pruitt’s dismantling of the agency). As much as it would help to highlight to believers of climate change that progress is possible, it pales in comparison to the necessity of convincing climate change deniers of the urgency and necessity of sustainable energy investment.
P.S. In how many places other than Portland do we think it’s economically feasible for a psychologist to specialize in climate anxiety? Also, someone as well versed in economist-think as Matt should know better than to say, “Indeed, the current projections of 2.2 or 2.7 degrees are closer to 1.5 degrees than to 4.4 degrees; we are more than halfway there.” It is almost certainly not the case that the warming projection as a function climate change mitigation investment decreases linearly.
I think we’re realizing for a lot of liberals “follow the science” means take the most risk-averse position and gloomy attitude possible, but that is not following the science.
Isn’t there a “just the right amount” of anxiety? I got a sense of dread about climate change a few months ago when looking at how we’ve handled Covid as a society and then looking at my daughters and thinking of their future. This pushed me into veganism for environmental reasons, which was a step I was thinking about for a while, but never had the incentive to really try. Having a bit of an emotional reaction to something is much more likely to push individuals to action. Obviously “doom scrolling” is not going to do anything, but also is “not doing anything”.
I think the question is whether *anxiety* itself is actually motivating. We want people to be motivated to do things about the climate. Some people assume that anxiety is motivating, and thus think we need anxiety. I personally find that for me, a "cooler" sort of more cognitive motivation tends to be more effective. I don't know how much this is generalizable and how much depends on the individual.
The most fervent advocates often seem to want seismic changes aimed ultimately at remaking society, sort of the way some people want crash diets to lose all their holiday weight in one weekend of virtue
Thank you, Matt, for encouraging people to choose work that addresses the climate issue. Besides keeping up with the broad strokes of the climate science and tech discourse, I basically ignore climate reporting and keep trucking with my career trying to make progress on this issue. I feel less climate doom than many in my circle, I think because I’m working on it, as are my colleagues and most people I encounter professionally. As you rightly say there is TONS to do. So much opportunity for basically every type of person, with every skill set, in every region, with every level of education.
P.S. If you haven’t heard first hand yet, EVs are so awesome. I leased a 2020 Hyundai Kona all electric last year and it is a legitimately great ride. Super peppy, fits my kid and my dog with a little room to spare, and had tons of fun bells and whistles. Even better, the state gave me a rebate that brought the price down to the equivalent of gas powered. If anyone is car shopping, at least consider an EV!
I don't think there's any big mystery here. As your piece explains several times, the effects of the *best case* scenarios (which are likely wildly optimistic) are "really bad." As you look at the less rosy and more likely scenarios, things go downhill from there. I would suggest this is why people are feeling hopeless and depressed. I don't see the need to theorize that they must be fixating on propaganda and bad information (though there is certainly plenty of that out there).
You seem perplexed that it doesn't cheer people up to hear that it's become less likely that things won't get so bad as to completely destroy the human race, or to contemplate that the impacts will be less disruptive than past events in human history like the adoption of agriculture. This doesn't strike me as odd, but maybe I have a different understanding of basic human psychology than you do.
In general, I don't like ascribing people's political beliefs to mental illness. For instance, see people here ascribing concern over still-high Covid deaths to mental illness rather than basing their views off different understanding of the facts or different preferences.
That said, I think anti-doomerism is helpful here. Some progress is possible and happening. It's good to harness people's energy. Obviously it's a much smaller problem compared to denialism or refusal to accept sacrifice, but it does have a paralyzing quality and I think makes people less likely to have the future-orieented thinking that we need.
Agree with David Wallace-Wells that anyone who sees a world of 3 degrees warming — or even 2.5 degrees — as a positive or happy outcome has a pretty grotesque, or at least deluded, perspective on human suffering. And with you that 2.7C is a lot less bad than 4.4C; that every tenth of a degree of avoided warming matters; and that despair-inducing doom-scrolling is not a good strategy for achieving the change we need. The subject of the NYT story you mentioned did say she compares her fears about our warming planet to someone with a fear of flying who learns to manage their fear well enough to fly, which sounds constructive to me.
> The prediction is something that I actually think is more likely than not to happen. With the warning, in this case, I am being hand-wavy about the actual probability (because I sincerely have no idea) but I’m trying to scare you a bit with a plausible small-probability catastrophe.
You could also frame this (a little more statistically rigorously) as this being the difference between an unconditional prediction (what will happen) vs. a conditional prediction (what could happen, given some state of the world we may not enter).
Also, I don't think there is any reason to expect climate events to be normally distributed. Like, your point about ratios in tails still stands, but if Taleb reads this ur in trouble m8.
I really liked this piece. Will be sharing it. In fact I liked it so much that I scrolled the comments- all of them. Maybe it’s the topic, maybe it’s Matt’s take but do other early subscribers find it’s got a bit angry here at times, lately. Used be a lot more civil, informative and thought-provoking. Would it be possible to have an ignore/hide/mute function for the commenters? I don’t want to stop anyone from posting their $8 of hate — I just don’t want to scroll through it to get to the posts I find more engaging.
On the substance, I haven’t encountered clinical “climate anxiety” but I do see three behaviors that I worry may be counterproductive as we work collectively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. First, overuse of scare tactics as indicated in Matt’s article. Not just by click-harvesting media, but by activists and green groups. Second, attribution of every undesirable or “disliked by me” environmental change to climate change: e.g. plastic bag litter, intensive farming runoff, pollinators population collapse, PFAS pollution. Third, excessive focus on energy conservation, anti-consumerism and de-industrialization as key strategies to get to net-zero.
I took Matt's advice and called my members of Congress to ask them to support the Apollo Act. It took about five minutes to call both my senators and my House rep.
I'd encourage everyone to take 10 minutes and program your MOC phone numbers into your own phone. Then, whenever they do something that annoys you, you can leave a message to complain. If, say, they start getting a bunch of calls about masking in schools, they do listen.
This is one of the most important points: "If you’re worried about other people’s impact on the climate, you need to push for policy changes that make it easier for them to do what they want to do in an ecologically sustainable way or else that outright ban them from doing something destructive." The best way to fight climate change is to lower the environmental footprint of stuff people do rather than drastically change society. You're certainly going to get less of a fight.
Cars are a significant source of greenhouse gas emission. The answer is to make cars that are either have very low emissions, or even better, zero emissions. Insisting we need to ban cars, or that we should increase public transit instead of going for zero emission cars isn't going to convince anyone.
Similarly, it's very popular to complain about McMansions' large carbon footprint. A lot of that complaining seems to come from people who think McMansions are tacky and overall awful. The aesthetic virtues of a McMansion are separate from the carbon footprint, but the two are often conflated. I'd rather have tons of really tacky McMansions that are carbon neutral than more tasteful housing that has a big carbon footprint.
I've somehow finally put together a few ideas in metaethics that I'd seen bumping around but didn't realize how they're connected. Some people think that actions or attitudes are right or wrong insofar as they are "fitting" to the cause. Others think that actions or attitudes are right or wrong insofar as they lead to desired outcomes. I'm personally a skeptic about such a "fittingness" concept, but if you think it's right and good to have the emotional state about climate change that is fitting, then maybe you think anxiety is right and good, even if it's counterproductive.
(In my professional life I'm usually thinking about this more in epistemic contexts - some people think that certain types of belief are fitting to your evidence, while I just care if a belief-formation strategy tends to yield quantities of truths that are relevant to one's interests, whether or not they "fit" the evidence.)
It's crazy that the framing here is "oh, why are people so down on the climate future???" without mentioning that oil companies & orgs have very intentionally sown climate anxiety, despair, and hopelessness:
https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/oil-companies-discourage-climate-action-study-says/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-deniers-shift-tactics-to-inactivism/
Also, the framing of temp. rise as a linear relationship is a fallacy.
If you buy that climate change was a major contributor to the Syrian refugee, and those 10+ million destabilized politics throughout Europe, it's not unreasonable to expect that the 150 million climate refugees (very conservatively) anticipated by 2050 will be substantially more geopolitically destabilizing.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/a-major-contributor-to-the-syrian-conflict-climate-change
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-climate-crisis-migration-and-refugees/
The therapy has a hint of “luxury fears” if we can make that a thing as well
It’s a strong indication that political punditry on Substack is more rational and evenhanded when on back-to-back days I can comment-rant at Jonah Goldberg of (conservative-leaning) The Dispatch and Matt for the exact same thing. That’s progress!
Now for the rant: It wasn’t Liberals anxious about the environment who gutted the EPA, forcing the resignations of many of its most competent employees (some of whom are good personal friends of mine, giving me unique insight into Pruitt’s dismantling of the agency). As much as it would help to highlight to believers of climate change that progress is possible, it pales in comparison to the necessity of convincing climate change deniers of the urgency and necessity of sustainable energy investment.
P.S. In how many places other than Portland do we think it’s economically feasible for a psychologist to specialize in climate anxiety? Also, someone as well versed in economist-think as Matt should know better than to say, “Indeed, the current projections of 2.2 or 2.7 degrees are closer to 1.5 degrees than to 4.4 degrees; we are more than halfway there.” It is almost certainly not the case that the warming projection as a function climate change mitigation investment decreases linearly.
Obviously coming at the issue from very different perspectives (or maybe not so very), but the coincidence of Matt's posting mere hours after Jonah Goldberg similarly wrote about climate anxiety makes me wonder if anyone has ever seen them in the same room together. https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/were-hooked-on-a-feelingof-despair?r=2jsnb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
I think we’re realizing for a lot of liberals “follow the science” means take the most risk-averse position and gloomy attitude possible, but that is not following the science.
Isn’t there a “just the right amount” of anxiety? I got a sense of dread about climate change a few months ago when looking at how we’ve handled Covid as a society and then looking at my daughters and thinking of their future. This pushed me into veganism for environmental reasons, which was a step I was thinking about for a while, but never had the incentive to really try. Having a bit of an emotional reaction to something is much more likely to push individuals to action. Obviously “doom scrolling” is not going to do anything, but also is “not doing anything”.
I think the question is whether *anxiety* itself is actually motivating. We want people to be motivated to do things about the climate. Some people assume that anxiety is motivating, and thus think we need anxiety. I personally find that for me, a "cooler" sort of more cognitive motivation tends to be more effective. I don't know how much this is generalizable and how much depends on the individual.
The most fervent advocates often seem to want seismic changes aimed ultimately at remaking society, sort of the way some people want crash diets to lose all their holiday weight in one weekend of virtue
Thank you, Matt, for encouraging people to choose work that addresses the climate issue. Besides keeping up with the broad strokes of the climate science and tech discourse, I basically ignore climate reporting and keep trucking with my career trying to make progress on this issue. I feel less climate doom than many in my circle, I think because I’m working on it, as are my colleagues and most people I encounter professionally. As you rightly say there is TONS to do. So much opportunity for basically every type of person, with every skill set, in every region, with every level of education.
P.S. If you haven’t heard first hand yet, EVs are so awesome. I leased a 2020 Hyundai Kona all electric last year and it is a legitimately great ride. Super peppy, fits my kid and my dog with a little room to spare, and had tons of fun bells and whistles. Even better, the state gave me a rebate that brought the price down to the equivalent of gas powered. If anyone is car shopping, at least consider an EV!
I don't think there's any big mystery here. As your piece explains several times, the effects of the *best case* scenarios (which are likely wildly optimistic) are "really bad." As you look at the less rosy and more likely scenarios, things go downhill from there. I would suggest this is why people are feeling hopeless and depressed. I don't see the need to theorize that they must be fixating on propaganda and bad information (though there is certainly plenty of that out there).
You seem perplexed that it doesn't cheer people up to hear that it's become less likely that things won't get so bad as to completely destroy the human race, or to contemplate that the impacts will be less disruptive than past events in human history like the adoption of agriculture. This doesn't strike me as odd, but maybe I have a different understanding of basic human psychology than you do.
In general, I don't like ascribing people's political beliefs to mental illness. For instance, see people here ascribing concern over still-high Covid deaths to mental illness rather than basing their views off different understanding of the facts or different preferences.
That said, I think anti-doomerism is helpful here. Some progress is possible and happening. It's good to harness people's energy. Obviously it's a much smaller problem compared to denialism or refusal to accept sacrifice, but it does have a paralyzing quality and I think makes people less likely to have the future-orieented thinking that we need.
“I just wonder where they are going to put all the garbage.” https://youtu.be/XdFjxhDOKNQ
Yup, Cliff Mass (meteorology prof at UWash) posted about this exact thing this week: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/02/climate-hype-leads-to-climate-anxiety.html