the author's a 27 y/o who went to stanford. looks like vox is her 2nd job

It actually reminds me of an apocryphal (?) conversation someone had with Lu Xun, a leftist author in 20th century China famous for his relentless social criticisms. The person supposedly asked Lu Xun: “We all live in a giant prison and there is no way we can break the bars. If everyone falls asleep, then they will never have to realize what miserable condition they live under. In that way they’d be happier than if they were awake. So why bother wake them up?”

Lu Xun supposedly said, “if everyone wakes up and binds their forces together, who is to say that they can’t break out of this prison?”

THEN STOP DESTROYING THEIR FUTURE

Kids: "Climate change will destroy the world, please do something about it"

Liberals: "Stop telling kids that climate change will ruin the world!"

Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world. It already has.

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When I was a kid, we were told it was supposed to be our job to fix these problems. But we were told this by the same people that refused to step aside and go live in their big fancy houses and have dinner parties with other people who live in big fancy houses.

Genie:

You are granted one wish, make it a good one.

Kids:

Genie, grant me the power to solve Climate Change

A gun? What am I supposed to do with this?

Genie:

[Redacted]

We once had smallpox and now we don't. Ok, but I must have missed the part where the pro smallpox industry insinuated itself into absolutely every worker's life and all the levers of government

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.

:agony-acid: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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.

:agony-immense: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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.

:agony-limitless:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The coming disaster won't destroy their world, it will create it. :posadist-nuke:

oh boy, another opportunity to plug one of citations neededs best episodes (and one of the best introductory episodes for libs): the neoliberal optimism industry

not specifically about the climate stuff (though still very relevant to it) but all the other ideological shit in it of everything getting better for everyone through the magic of neoliberalism and the washington consensus, and how thats bullshit and stephen pinker and bill gates and other epstein pals are full of shit (and then sneakily segues into a really great introduction to modern neo-imperialism)

Maybe instead of just yelling at children to be more optimistic they could like, idk, actually do something to give the youth hope for the future. Y'know like actually do something to stop climate change

What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.

:pinker:

“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life,” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia, told Ezra Klein in his column this week about overcoming climate despair.

Broke: Climate Scientist at Columbia telling first-world children to be optimistic

Woke: Colombian Leftist Guerrilla and current Presidential front-runner telling children in the global south that he plans to halt all new oil exploration and perform sweeping land reforms to direct the value of the land to public benefit.

“You see children saying things like ‘The world’s going to burn up, we’re all going to be dead in 20 years,’ and that’s pretty unlikely,” Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist who studies how climate change affects mental health, told National Geographic in an article about kids and climate anxiety.

Don't worry, just turn up the air conditioning. Everything's going to be fi- power sputters during historic heat wave

"Hey guys, if we do - as looks increasingly likely - kick off a chain of events that causes the extinction of humanity now, it'll take hundreds - maybe even thousands - of years for its inexorable unwinding to reach its grim telos. So what's the big deal?"