The Nation: Dan Sherrell's Book On The Trap Of Climate Optimism

[hatrack]

EDIT

AB: I appreciate your insistence on uncertainty, because part of the relief of apocalypse movies is that we finally know, and we can see it. And there’s a kind of climate denialism where if we can’t see a blockbuster dystopia outside our window, we can’t imagine that it’s happening. If there aren’t zombies coming, then climate change must be too far off to worry about.

DS: I haven’t done the regression analysis on this, but I would bet the number of zombie movies correlates pretty well to the prevalence of climate research in the public discourse. But apocalypse narratives tend to force people into one of two directions, both of them bad. On the one hand, there’s the fatalism of “Well, we’re doomed, so why bother?” And I struggle with that myself sometimes! But there’s also complacency, where we’ve seen the end of the world so many times on TV that we look out our window, and it doesn’t really look like that. The world appears mundane and normal. So that leads us to assume that we’ll just jump into action when the time comes. But the time is now! Neither of those things is what we need, politically. What we need is something that balances patience with urgency. What we need is to feel real possibility without being blinded by facile optimism or crushing despair.

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DS: Optimism is the feeling that things are going to work out in the end, and I don’t have that feeling—at all. I think we have to be real with ourselves about the possibility that political systems could fail to rise to the occasion and climatic feedback loops could start to set in, and the 21st century could become very, very scary.

But hope, for me, is equivalent to indeterminacy or anti-fatalism. What I outlined above is one potential pathway, but we really don’t know how this thing is going to go. There are a range of possible outcomes between 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and 4 or 5 degrees, and the difference between those two worlds is night and day. But we do still have the ability to shape where the dial lands between those two poles. That is hope: the ongoing feeling that the future is not predetermined and that we can help shape it. There’s a truism in the climate movement that says hope is a discipline, and you have to actively cultivate it. Hope isn’t “Liquid hydrogen will come in and save us all.” Hope is knowing that every increment we move the thermometer in one direction or the other saves or consigns millions of people to life or death. I can’t imagine higher stakes than that. And I can’t imagine anything that would invest a human life with more meaning than that struggle.

EDIT

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/dan-sherrell-warmth-qa/

[NNadir]

1. I believe him when he says...

...he "hasn't done the regression analysis on this..."

He has a Fulbright Scholarship in creative writing, so he should definitely know what he doesn't know, I think.

Of course, from my perspective anyone who talks even remotely seriously about whether or not liquid hydrogen will save us all has probably not looked very deeply into the problem at all from an engineering standpoint.

Of course, liquid hydrogen has been discussed here recently, which is depressing, but telling I think on the question of whether anyone is taking this matter seriously.

By the way, the so called "Green New Deal" put forth by Ed Markey isn't remotely serious either. It is however, creative writing.