Diabetes or asteroid?

Normally when I am alone, I am travelling somewhere. This time, it is everyone else who has travelled.

I work my way through my to-do list, completing every easy task until I run into the difficult ones, like figuring out what kind of arguments that would actually bite on those who long ago stopped listening to arguments. In an excellent article published today, Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath ask the question if climate change is more like an asteroid or diabetes? If it is indeed an asteroid, as suggested by for instance our own Staffan Laestadius when he calls for “comprehensive political change”, it is of course problematic to begin your argument by outright rejecting the only technology that historically has made possible emissions cuts proportionally commensurate with the targets of the Paris Agreement and instead arrive at a long list of partisan demands that is eerily identical to what these authors used to promote long before climate change came into vogue.

Some have suggested that climate radicalism is nevertheless warranted in order to move the “Overton window” and that we should “aim for communism in order to hit social democracy”. As I have made clear over and over again, I could not disagree more with this kind of analysis as I believe that it will only deepen our partisan divides. On this theme, Ted and Alex make the following observation which is worth quoting in full:

“it is not clear that the army of egalitarian millenarians that the climate movement is mobilizing will be willing to sign on to the necessary compromises — politically, economically, and technologically — that would be necessary to actually address the problem. Anyone who doubts this need only direct their gaze toward the other side of the political spectrum, where conservatives and Republicans are now entirely captive to the nativist forces they have unleashed over the last decade in their battles with Obama-era progressives”

With this in mind, the problem remains, what kind of evidence would the Green New Dealers need to reconsider their insistance on a 100% renewable energy future? Clearly, neither rising emissions nor doubling electricity prices seem to matter, as such “facts” only seem to vindicate their deep-held belief that "capitalism" is unsustainable...

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Tomorrow I have six more hours of lectures coming up and I need to finish my last preparations. Looking through the latest issue of Monocle I realize that almost a whole month has passed since we were in Paris. In Swedish, we have this expression “oxveckorna” (“ox weeks”) to describe this time of the year and it could not be any more appropriate.