Code words

It is too late for games. It is beyond frustrating that, despite the seriousness of the environmental crisis, we still do not even try to understand why we disagree. I started reading Sverker Sörlin’s book Antropocen with an open mind. Although I knew that my ideological outlook was quite different from his, I still had only the highest respect for him as a scholar.

But a few dozen pages in, I begin to sense a disturbing sloppiness. First, seemingly innocent misinterpretations of the kind that you can find in any book, like when Sörlin (on page 55) constructs a straw man of Fukuyama so that he can quickly contend that “he was wrong, of course” without even engaging with the breadth of Fukuyama’s thinking. Then, as Sörlin trains his guns on the Breakthrough Institute, I really start losing my patience. The use of small code words like “market liberals” (if anything, Breakthrough is essentially social democratic, with its strong emphasis on publicly funded innovation) quickly grows into a wholesale dismissal of the work that Michael Shellenberger has been doing to save nuclear power in the United States. Through a game of words, Sörlin projects an image of Michael as an evangelically motivated zealot who “mixes science, religion and ideology”.

Why?

I guess the answer is the same as always. Nuclear really does bring out the worst in people, even climate scientists who should at least pretend to judge these issues impartially.

Sometimes, I really get why conservatives in the US think that climate change is just “too good a problem”…