From 173-year-old Harper's Magazine, April 2023 edition:
How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying and love the calm
The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021. “Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9. “There is no chance that the world will avoid the effects of warming—we’re already experiencing them—but neither is there any point at which we are doomed.” Writing in the Guardian a few days later, Rebecca Solnit highlighted a paragraph from a recent report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that said carbon-dioxide removal technology could theoretically “reverse . . . some aspects of climate change.” Though she admitted this was “a long shot” that would require “heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary commitment,” Solnit nevertheless concluded, “It is possible to do. And we know how to do it.”
In the following months, a new mode of environmental reporting bloomed: the age of climate optimism was upon us. Elizabeth Weil captured the shift in a 2022 New York magazine story about how everyday people ought to contend with the crisis. Weil catalogued the usual depredations of her beat: fleeing a Marin County meditation retreat after wildfires fouled the air, crying about the gloomy future in the serenity of Houston’s Rothko Chapel. But her mood lifted during a rally marking the seventeenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In rapturous terms, she described the scene under a highway overpass in New Orleans:
Flagboy Giz rapped about gentrification in his Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indian headdress. A woman sold shrimp and grits out of hotel pans. A man stood and watched for hours, a sleeping toddler on his shoulder. Nothing here looked like climate action. It looked like perseverance.
Each participant was contributing to what the activist Heather McTeer Toney called a “jazz sense of chaos” response to a warming world. “I’m playing the flute. Someone else over here is beating drums,” Toney told Weil. “We need those saxophonists that are going to do whatever the hell they feel like they want to do.”
In the media, writers and editors have also been uncasing their instruments. Last May the Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee announced an expansion of the paper’s Climate Solutions vertical, an initiative designed to highlight people and organizations “offering hope for the future” while at the same time “empowering readers to understand how they can make a difference.” To date, the section has run stories on the effort to ban plastic utensils and a Milwaukee-based reward program for informants of illegal dumping. More recently, the Post debuted Climate Coach, an advice column “about the environmental choices we face in our daily lives.” In the Los Angeles Times, the energy reporter Sammy Roth embraced the can-do turn in climate coverage. “Anyone who reads my stories knows I’m biased toward climate solutions, and my reporting flows from that,” Roth wrote. The happiest warrior of them all, the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, weighed in with a column titled “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think.” With global solar power capacity anticipated to nearly triple in five years, a breakthrough in the development of nuclear fusion, and advancements in battery storage, Kristof wrote that we were experiencing a “revolution of renewables”: “Progress is possible when we put our shoulder to it,” he concluded. “Onward!”
The sea change culminated last October, in the form of the New York Times Magazine’s annual climate issue, which featured comic-book-style depictions of “The New World” that climate change would create, illustrated by Anuj Shrestha and annotated by David Wallace-Wells. “Not very long ago,” Wallace-Wells wrote, some scientists believed that emissions “could cause four or five degrees Celsius of warming, giving rise to existential fears about apocalyptic futures.” Now a two-to-three-degree range was more likely, “thanks to a global political awakening, an astonishing decline in the price of clean energy, a rise in global policy ambition and revisions to some basic modeling assumptions.”....
....MUCH MORE
If you recall, the last report from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (March 2023) elicited some horrific headlines for a day or two and then....nothing. In some ways akin to Orwell's Two Minutes Hate.
Being the cheery folks that we are, our post on the release tried to look on the bright side:
New U.N. IPCC Climate Report: We Are All Going To Die But We May Be Able To Save The Planet
I mention the age of Harper's to make the point they've seen a lot and as something to keep in mind when perusing their offerings. Previously from Harpers:
- 172 Year Old Harper's Magazine Declares The American Century Is Over
- Information, Disinformation And Power
- Global Warming As The Last Market Bubble
- "The Big Tech Extortion Racket" (GOOG; AMZN; FB)
- "How $1.8 billion in aid to Ukraine was funneled to the outposts of the international finance galaxy"
- "Scientists advised against consuming hypersexual zombie cicadas infected with psychoactive fungus"
