What's your climate solution tribe?
November 30, 2022 1:54 PM   Subscribe

After COP27 closed it is clear the climate conversation is shifting toward action, but division on the best solutions remains. Writer and researcher Nadia Asparouhova maps out what she calls the seven climate tribes ranging from the "Technology will save us" Energy Maximalist to the "It's already too late" Doomerist.
posted by LiteS (8 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Not the best framing and doesn't seem to be producing appropriate participation. -- travelingthyme



 
This comes across as needlessly condescending, and also misses the bigger picture.

It's not that hard to find actual peoples (or "tribes", if you prefer) who are agitating for better climate policy. And they are deadly serious, because their existence is literally at stake.
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:23 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]


I am but a humble commenter, asking others who come after me to please be aware that knee-jerk despairing responses regarding climate change are a recurring issue.

July 2019: Climate-related posts on the blue

November 2019: Would MetaFilter be a better place without relentless negativity?

February 2021: Children and Climate Change

Please consider your comments carefully, as they can have unanticipated effects on people who read them.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 2:24 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]


I just read this one today and it was pretty good:

How to Protect the Economy When it Becomes too Hot to Work

I think on the east coast US, where Washington DC and New York are, we're pretty well insulated from a lot of the worst effects of climate change, like wet-bulb temperatures above 35 where being outside is literally deadly, and catastrophic drought, and melting glaciers. And that insulation makes the US slower to act than other places.

But then this article is not talking about deadly catastrophes, but the effects on the global economy of working less days in a year as the heat index rises. And the global economy is so over-leveraged, so just-in-time, and worker's rights are so slim, that those unpaid heat days are themselves an economic issue.

So the article talks about reorganizing work through the government to build in more of social net. I don't know what the political will for this is, but something has to happen because otherwise it's a future where civilization collapses while the rich hide out in their bunkers, you know?
posted by subdee at 2:32 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]


Don't worry. Everything with all this climate stuff will turn out alright in the end.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:35 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]


Oh gosh, this is way more interesting than it might seem at first glance, since it's not focusing on, like, "what tribe is some random person in," and really isn't a "pick one for yourself!" article, but is specifically about people who are working in climate right now, and the origins of their different mindsets, how those mindsets determine which climate solutions they work on, and the conflicts that arise from those differences. "If religious tendencies cannot be repressed from our collective psyches, why not start with the premise that climate is a religion, then try to understand it on those terms? Instead of insisting that we 'stick to science' or only focus on technology, we can instead evaluate climate opportunities through the lens of tribal values."

So like, regardless of where you might personally fall on the doom-to-optimism spectrum, this is a really intriguing look into one way to think about the huge amount of thought and work going into climate right now.
posted by mittens at 3:17 PM on November 30, 2022 [3 favorites]


I am a little suspicious of the methodology here - reading a lot of material and only then talking to a handful of climate experts feels like you're going to build a model, which you'll believe in so strongly that actually talking to people and asking them directly is not going to be able to shake it. Wouldn't you need to conduct interviews first, ask people about what they perceive to be the factions in climate science, and then follow that up with the written material?
posted by Merus at 3:17 PM on November 30, 2022


Asparouhova, formerly Eghbal, previously.

I decided to only skim her piece because I have found her work analytically poor in the past and because her newsletter announcement of this piece includes the offputting line:
I was searching for the one weird reason that was causing hordes of people to drop what they were doing and march, hypnotically, towards the same problem space.
"hypnotically"?

I did appreciate a few of her points, such as the point that the Artificial Intelligence industry and the climate industry have some parallels and are in some ways in competition with each other for investment, talent, etc.
posted by brainwane at 3:21 PM on November 30, 2022 [1 favorite]


That said, her 'discovery' that the climate field is a fair bit more optimistic than you'd expect given the direness of the problem tracks with my own experience - I used to work at a climate change institute, as admin staff, where it seemed well-understood that at least one solution existed and a large part of what the researchers were doing was finding new way to implement things, and finding new solutions so we have choices. (If we were willing to halt the entire world economy and possibly let a lot of people starve, we could pretty rapidly implement the technological changes required to avoid catastrophic climate change, but people get a little weird about policy changes that require them to starve.)
posted by Merus at 3:39 PM on November 30, 2022 [2 favorites]


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