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Climate Disinformers Love To Pretend The Problem Is The Solution [1]

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Date: 2023-10-06  

One of the old standbys for sophistry is accusing people of hypocrisy (in other words, claiming that someone is saying one thing, but doing the opposite). Of course, hypocrisy should be called out, as actions speak louder than words and all that. But these accusations are also easily weaponized and used by bad-faith actors to put their opponents in no-win situations.

For example, there’s the case of air travel. Jets are bad for the climate, so one of the requisite solutions for the climate crisis is to reduce air travel and replace jet fuel with carbon-free alternatives. But climate disinformers love to argue that anyone who's concerned about the climate is a hypocrite for using fossil fuels. This is a bad faith attack, because climate activists know that individual sacrifices (like not flying) won’t change a systemically polluting society, and most people have no choice but to live within this dirty system even as they try to improve it. That's what improving it means, is making it so that clean options available!

Disinformers, though, use the existence of hypothetical plans that would have people fly less to meet climate goals as an excuse to complain that the evil, "insane" greenies want to take away everything fun . Then, when someone in a Just Stop Oil shirt boards a plane, climate deniers ridicule them online . Damned if you do fly, damned if you suggest that maybe one day people shouldn’t quite so often.

What, then, are the solutions these critics are proposing?

Well that's where things get fun, because apparently the solution to environmental problems is to let those causing them just keep doing their thing, and then the environment will go away, and we'll have no problems!

For example, at the Washington Examiner , the Maui wildfires weren't a result of colonialism and capitalism turning a verdant paradise into tinderbox, but a consequence of stopping one particular instance of the colonial-era, capitalism-driven monocropping of sugar. "Had the 145-year-old sugar plantation been able to continue to manage the land," wrote Jeff Stier, "the fire, whatever caused it, certainly wouldn’t have been fueled to burn as destructively as it did."

Of course! If only all our land was being farmed by international conglomerates for the profit of shareholders, then climate change-influenced wildfires would simply disappear!

It's the same play as the plan to pay the timber industry to cut down forests in order to prevent forest fires, because if there's a problem, apparently the solution is to just pretend like the problem is the solution!

[Editorial note: We'll be off next week, and will return on Tuesday the 17th!]

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