how to freak out about climate the right amount
there's a lot of end-of-the-world style stuff going around. but listen--it's not going to be the end of the world.
this ispart of our whole christian/mythic episteme. we operate in the mythic garden-fall-apocalypse cycle and fit our conceptions of the future to that.
yet even if we were to completely nuke the earth it wouldn't be the apocalypse. for a lot of people sure. maybe even all people. but critically the world isn't people. maybe i'm parsing things a bit too fine here but the world isn't going to end when the human world ends.
and global warming isn't going to kill all humans. a bunch maybe? but we'll adapt.
it's hard for folks to hear something like without reading into it a bunch of prescriptive and moral implications that i simply did not say.
i didn't say that global warming is ok. i didn't say that it won't make our lives immeasurably more difficult and less predictable. i didn't say that it isn't going to disproportionately affect certain (often low-income and precariously-resourced) regions more than others. i didn't say any of that.
but the fact is that we have thus far failed to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere. we have to live with the consequences of it. we can stop more warming from happening! absolutely!
i'm not a doomer. i think were we to get our shit together we could solve this. in the meantime while we try to advocate for solving it there's adaptation to be done. you can do both!