We recently received a self-promotional email from fossil-fuel promoter Alex Epstein, pointing to his latest interview, where he learned that his own I <3 Fossil Fuels work actually (apparently) converted a climate activist to what he calls a “climate thinker,” which is his term for denier.
The supposed convert is Joakim Book, so we went a-lookin’ to see what kind of environmentalist-turned-denier he must be, because in the interview he can’t really name any specific protests he attended — “It didn’t much matter, it could be LGBT rights, it could be climate action, I dunno, we did protests against… drugs.” Clearly he was very committed to these causes! (He does later claim to have been part of a college Divestment group, and claims to have gone to the 2011 Durban COP, during his year between high school and college as part of a management training program, “but most of the time we spent talking with other people, confirming our biases if you will.”)
Turns out he’s more or less the same as any other supposed converts that abandons the moral teachings of their youth to follow a libertarian ideology down the denier career path, like Patrick Moore, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger, etc. Contrary to Epstein's clean-cut description — in which Book was “heavily influenced” by the I<3 Fossil Fuels work and it’s self-described 'pro-human philosophy' — it seems more like Book just read Atlas Shrugged and got bored with school-age activism.
Which is why Book is now writing the sort of anti-environmentalist stuff that got Epstein’s attention. The Swede’s writing is sometimes on behalf of the American Institute for Economic Research, an industry-funded group that’s recently been circulating disinformation on pandemic lockdowns, as highlighted by the Guardian recently.
Joakim was of course very proud to be “officially hated” by the Guardian, and tweeted a link to his defense of writing for an obviously-financially-biased group: “I never received a call from Mr. Koch – not so much as an email or a DM! – instructing me to 'obfuscate science.' Nobody at AIER ever told me to puff my pieces into a more climate-hostile attitude, or downplay risks of global warming. How exactly did Koch money taint my arguments on climate change?”
Of course! If a funder doesn’t directly call up every single low-level writer, clearly there’s no bias!
Now, a good writer — a real “climate thinker,” in Epstein’s lingo — might consider the fact that if Koch money had not created an ecosystem in which subpar arguments conducive to polluter profits can thrive, he might have to actually get a real job producing content that isn’t one small step removed from an advertisement.
But Joakim Book is… not a good writer. At his Medium blog, he has a post that really lays bare the cravenly selfish and fundamentally anti-human hatred ensconced in the supposedly 'pro-human' propaganda of Epstein and other free-market fetishists.
It’s called “Why I Hate Toddlers and Their Parents.” It’s exactly as stupid and self-centered as the title suggests. You see, Book likes to spend long stretches of time at coffee shops (because are you really a writer if no one sees you writing?) and occasionally parents bring their children in, and those children are loud, and, worst of all, their parents love them! Seriously, Joakim is very mad about “this cosmic need for parents to bring their toddlers into public places,” and particularly, passionately, virulently hates the woman who “will not stop smooching” her baby.
Joakim “can’t fathom why anyone would have a child,” but does grant that “some people like it,” but what he can’t “grasp is why we let them out in public, these little monsters.”
“Sometimes it’s like the world is punishing me” he writes, “when a couple enters my reading cafe not with one but two of these monsters.”
Book — with his supposed ownership of the “my” (public) cafe and apparent belief that children shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public — believes that otherwise “civilised and respectful human beings,” lose that respect for others upon having children, and calls it “Egocentricity maximised. It’s absurd.”
Behold the incredibly un-self-awareness of a man, sitting in a public space, writing a complaint that children exist in public and deciding it's the parents who are egocentric. This man, incensed at the existence of children, is Alex Epstein’s latest supposedly pro-human speaker, a real “climate thinker.”
Now THAT is absurd.
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