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Climate Trolling

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Andrew Revkin of the New York Times continues his climate trolling, this time complaining about people just being so unreasonable about climate change:

But on the Keystone XL pipeline – which, if not blocked by President Obama, would carry the crudest form of oil from Canadian tar sand deposits to Gulf Coast fuel refineries — it seems there’s little room for varied stances, at least according to some protesters.

As I wrote in 2011 (here, then here), a tight focus on Obama’s decision over the pipeline could be counterproductive if the hope is to build policies that might someday reduce the need for oil, whether the source is Alberta oil sands, the floor of the Gulf of Mexico or the Niger River delta. (A solid review of the climate impact was provided by Raymond Pierrehumbert on Realclimate.org in 2011.)

But Wen Stephenson, a former Atlantic and Boston Globe editor who has become a climate campaigner on behalf of his, and others’, children, sees little room for dialogue.

Imagine that–people actually believing that a project is just unacceptable and eschewing compromise over an issue that will only drive half the world’s species to extinction and make life significantly worse for most human beings. Revkin is the classic villager on climate, wanting nice conservative compromise on the issues, even before we actually get to the table with the powers that be that actually control the apparatus, like the oil and gas industry. What’s important for Revkin is the compromise.

David Roberts provides a more definitive response:

Revkin seems preoccupied with the fact that Keystone is part of larger systems and not particularly significant in light of that context. And it’s true: Everything is insignificant in light of some larger context. Climate change is a “wicked problem,” which means that everything passing as a solution will be flawed, partial, and impermanent. What to do? We are rapidly losing ground, on the verge of locking in a trajectory scientists tell us will lead to disastrous and irreversible consequences. We can sit around and fill our blogs with reasons why this or that solution is the wrong one, inferior to some better one that we’d already have, goldarnit, if those meddling pushers-of-other-solutions weren’t “distracting” from ours. We can fall in love with the ineffable intellectual tangle, as Revkin has, and accept that anything specific enough to build an activist campaign around will be meaningless in the context of global energy demand and emissions. We can read the Serenity Prayer and get used to the fact that it’s all out of our hands anyway.

But some people want to fight! Some people actually haul themselves out from behind their keyboards, call a bunch of friends, put on warm clothes, and go stomp around in public yelling about it. These are the folks throwing sand in the social gears, the ones trying to wrest the levers of power out of hostile hands. As a professional word-typer, like Revkin, I have come to believe that those people deserve a certain level of respect and forbearance. Maybe shouting advice down to them from the bloggy heights isn’t as helpful as we word-typers are inclined to think. At least we could refrain from pissing on them while they’re rallying.

I’m going to have a number of climate-related posts coming up, so I’ll save some of my thoughts for later. But I will say one thing. The last thing the climate movement needs is to listen to someone positioning himself as a David Broder of environmental issues. And that’s what Andrew Revkin is.

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