"Today’s progressives espouse climate change as the “greatest existential threat of our time,” a claim that ignores people who have been experiencing existential threats for much longer. Slavery, colonialism, ongoing police brutality—we can’t neglect history to save the future."
Is the author being intentionally provocative or just obtuse? What is this author trying to achieve with this paragraph? If someone sincerely believes that climate change is a worldwide existential threat, why shame them for not taking slavery, colonialism, and police brutality just as seriously? Advocacy and activism is not a zero sum game.
It's slippery race-baiting to sell views with manufactured outrage. Existential threats don't care about race, skin color, eye color, height, or anything else by definition.
The best steelmanning I can give to this author is that she's talking about a narrow phenomenon of more interest to her than to other people.
This isn't about climate change, but about climate anxiety. The former is an environmental problem; the latter is a psychological one. The two are related in that a solution to climate change also alleviates climate anxiety. As a psychological problem it's more acute and immediate, and therefore capable of attracting more news attention, potentially drawing news attention away from other pressing matters.
But... I feel like nobody cares about climate anxiety except her. Googling the phrase turns up 140,000 hits -- compared to 77,000,000 for "black lives matter". That's a crude metric, though it's also enhanced by the way the first page of results is a scattering of news articles stretched over the past several years.
It's a thing, but it doesn't really appear to be sucking the oxygen out of the room. Maybe it could -- it's true that reporters could be easily drawn to young white college students who really, really care about the environment and are suffering that they can't fix it. It makes a good news story -- occasionally. But I really don't think it has taken focus off of other problems.
So I'm not entirely sure what this is about -- aside from the cynical observation that she is the one who published a book about Climate Anxiety a year ago, whose sales are surely flagging now.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 14.6 ms ] threadIs the author being intentionally provocative or just obtuse? What is this author trying to achieve with this paragraph? If someone sincerely believes that climate change is a worldwide existential threat, why shame them for not taking slavery, colonialism, and police brutality just as seriously? Advocacy and activism is not a zero sum game.
This isn't about climate change, but about climate anxiety. The former is an environmental problem; the latter is a psychological one. The two are related in that a solution to climate change also alleviates climate anxiety. As a psychological problem it's more acute and immediate, and therefore capable of attracting more news attention, potentially drawing news attention away from other pressing matters.
But... I feel like nobody cares about climate anxiety except her. Googling the phrase turns up 140,000 hits -- compared to 77,000,000 for "black lives matter". That's a crude metric, though it's also enhanced by the way the first page of results is a scattering of news articles stretched over the past several years.
It's a thing, but it doesn't really appear to be sucking the oxygen out of the room. Maybe it could -- it's true that reporters could be easily drawn to young white college students who really, really care about the environment and are suffering that they can't fix it. It makes a good news story -- occasionally. But I really don't think it has taken focus off of other problems.
So I'm not entirely sure what this is about -- aside from the cynical observation that she is the one who published a book about Climate Anxiety a year ago, whose sales are surely flagging now.