Let's not get all catastrophic about this!
If we fail to confront the climate emergency and doom our children and future generations to potentially catastrophic hardship and suffering that it is still largely within our power to prevent, it will not be because of the climate deniers and their cronies. All just battles are fought against entrenched opposition, and the climate battle is no different.
No, if we fail, it will be due to the insidious “optimism” of ostensible allies like “Liberal Patriot” Ruy Teixiera who offer false hope disguised as pragmatism that saps our motivation to fight and cuts the legs out from under those who understand the stakes and are trying to rally support for the cause of – in a very real, non-hysterical way – saving the world. If we succumb to the tempting counter-narrative he offers up in his recent article, “Climate Catastrophism Is A Loser,” we will have failed on both a practical and a moral level.
Teixiera calls himself an “optimistic leftist,” and I have admired his writing when it focuses attention on the way that progressivism undermines its own goals when it ignores the practical realities of appealing to the American electorate and achieving policy wins. So I was excited to see him tackle the issue of climate, assuming that, understanding the gravity of the situation and the public’s manifest lack of interest, he would have a smart take on a realistic path to achieving necessary action.
Indeed, he begins with a clear and compelling statement of the problem, noting the bleak facts:
In the latest Gallup “most important problem” poll, climate change comes in at a whopping 2 percent (open-ended response). A new Pew survey asked the public about a lengthy series of policy priorities and whether they should be a “top priority” to address in the coming year. The result: climate change came in way behind strengthening the economy, reducing health care costs, dealing with the coronavirus, improving education, defending against terrorism, improving the political system, reducing crime and improving the job situation and also behind dealing with immigration, reducing the deficit, addressing the criminal justice system and dealing with the problems of poor people (whew). That’s 13 issues in front of climate change!
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Surveys have repeatedly showed that, while the public mostly acknowledges climate change is ongoing and they are at least somewhat concerned about it, the issue is not so salient that they are willing to sacrifice much to combat it.
So far, so true. It seems incontestable that at present, among most voters, climate change is an afterthought – highlighting the magnitude of the challenge our leaders face in building support for the kind of comprehensive policies and momentous changes that climate scientists are telling us would be required to responsibly address the situation.
But then, with a sickening feeling building in my stomach, I read this:
This reality sits uneasily against the default approach of the climate left, which now dominates the Democratic party and preaches a catastrophism that permits no debate. According to this line of thinking, climate change is a trend that will roast the planet and wipe out human civilization unless drastic action is taken very, very soon. For most on the left of the Democratic party, the apocalyptic pronouncements of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion are more plausible than arguments that a warming climate is a problem susceptible to reform and better policy, addressable through adaptation and technological innovation. It is assumed that we are headed for, in David Wallace-Wells’ phrase, “the uninhabitable Earth.” When green activists claim we have five or, at most, ten years to solve the problem by achieving net-zero carbon emissions, most Democratic activists nod in agreement.
This paragraph could have been written verbatim by the public relations department of ExxonMobil – so replete is it with false equivalence, false optimism, and out-and-out falsehood disguised as clearheaded thinking. Whatever Teixiera’s intentions – and I’m genuinely confused about what he thinks he’s doing here – this framing is a siren song for people like you and me – people who have been told that we face an existential crisis that requires immediate action and are motivated to do something about it -- to just relax about the climate and go back to living our ordinary lives, which of course we would all dearly like to do.
And this is perhaps the oddest part of Teixiera’s meretricious segue into denialism: his assertion that those of us who assert an existential climate crisis are either deliberately misinterpreting the data, or naively believing those who do. I’m not reading that into what he wrote – he directly accuses UN Secretary General Antonio Guterrez and the “mainstream media” of distorting the facts:
…The new [IPCC] report was surer that global warming is caused by humans, but much less sure that it would produce an extreme outcome. That would seem to qualify as good news, but the reception of the report still tended toward the apocalyptic. The UN Secretary General characterized the report’s message as a “code red for humanity,” where only immediate, drastic action could prevent “catastrophe.” Countless stories in mainstream media took a similar tack, which was amplified by environmental activists and echoed by most politicians on the left.
Now, why would the head of the UN, summarizing a report created by his own scientists, deliberately distort its findings to falsely assert a Code Red emergency? And why would he receive no pushback from those scientists or any skeptical response from the mainstream media, at least some of which can surely have been counted on to at least skim the report for accuracy? And why would “most politicians” repeat misinformation that they know full well (per Teixiera) polls like poison?
We know what the denialists on the right would say: because climate activism is a kind of ideological movement approaching a secular religion, the adherents of which fantasize apocalyptic outcomes to justify their hatred of capitalism, growth, and/or technology and to justify their secret desire to install some kind of a universal bureaucracy to strip away our freedom and rule the world.
But that is, of course, nuts.
A more plausible theory as to why the Secretary General’s warning, amplified by the “mainstream media” and politicians “on the left” did not receive more pushback from the scientists responsible for the report or their colleagues would be that they don’t disagree. And a more plausible explanation for Teixiera’s apparently non-deliberate misunderstanding of the state of the science around the relative risks, the urgency of the situation, the timeframe for effective action is that he has allowed his “optimism” to color his own objectivity.
After all, wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have face a climate emergency entailing hard choices and daunting challenges? Wouldn’t it be a relief if the “catastrophism” preached by Greta Thunberg weren’t just a pointed restatement of the conclusions of the scientific community? Imagine if, after all, we only needed a little “adaptation and technological innovation” rather than having to convince the world to drastically alter its entire energy, agricultural, and industrial infrastructure within an alarmingly limited timespan. Wouldn’t we all breathe a huge sigh of relief, and wouldn’t the scientists themselves be thrilled to share the good news?
But that is manifestly not the situation we face, and as terrifying as it is that so many powerful interests are lining up against climate action, to me it is even more terrifying to see people like Teixiera carrying water for them, penetrating into and breaking up the pressure that has been building for action, like the warm sea water seeping into the Antarctic glaciers.
Because the fact is, we need people like Teixiera to keep us focused on the goal. We on the left do have a tendency to veer off into important but peripheral issues when the crisis at hand is fundamentally about implementing policies to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere. We do need to acknowledge realities involving energy supply, the ramp-up of renewables, the global nature of the problem, the reluctance of voters to sacrifice now to abet future risk, the perils of defeatism, and dozens more enormous challenges. But contra Teixiera, it’s not in fact, “catastrophism” to accurately depict the risks we face when the science also tells us that we can still likely prevent these outcomes. If anything, it’s pragmatic catastrophe- avoidance!
Unfortunately, instead of lending his manifest talents to this eminently pragmatic goal, Teixiera invites us to indulge in wishful thinking based on having done his own research, concluding:
It therefore follows that since: (1) the climate change issue is not that salient among the broad public (as opposed to Democratic professional class activists); and (2) the results of a hasty ramping up of renewable energy sources are likely to undermine, not increase, support for climate change action, Democrats should take the long view of the climate change problem.
The trouble is that in this case, if the scientists are right and Teixiera’s “Liberal Optimism” proves unwarranted, then — to paraphrase Keynes — in “the long view,” we are all dead.
