Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Fires

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To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (“They don’t mean me”) or by despair (“There’s nothing we can do”). Each of us must find our work and do it.<br>--Audre Lorde<br>Some people like to strike worldly and cynical postures, perhaps because they don't realize that worldly and cynical are only too often in conflict with each other. Those striking the posture often assume that the more you know about something the darker and grimmer it will get, and therefore, having not really bothered to learn more, they can set themselves up as worldly by waxing cynical. Often they're wrong in assuming that any positive view is the result of – well the favorite word is naïveté – when often the opposite is true. There is naive cynicism, bitter naïveté, confident assumptions that things are worse than they actually are.<br>One arena in which this is startlingly true is climate. I have been around the climate movement for more than fifteen years. Everyone who's up to their neck in climate politics, economics, and science knows the situation is serious, alarming, dismaying – but not doomed, and so they keep doing what they can do. Their valor, generosity of spirit, dedication is so profoundly beautiful that being around these people one of the rewards for doing climate work (though our main purpose trying to protect the miraculous, gorgeous, astonishing planet and all its elegantly orchestrated systems of life and the support systems of that life).<br>But outside that world of informed people who are doing the work are people who throw up their hands and give up. I will assume some of them sincerely believe that it's too late, there's nothing we can do, we have no solutions, and nobody cares. For others it might be an excuse for doing nothing – if you can pretend the drowning people will inevitably drown, you justify remaining a bystander. But it's always puzzled me: if you think the entire realm of life on earth is threatened wouldn't you throw yourself into understanding the threat the way you do when you get an alarming medical diagnosis? But lots of people don't. They make uninformed we-are-doomed-it's-too-late pronouncements and remain bystanders. (It's been staggering to hear that people make the decision not to have kids based on vague assumptions about the state of the planet; in recent years, my younger climate friends had a little baby boom.)<br>In the Petri Dishes of Public Opinion<br>With apologies, I am going to lead you into the Great Dismal Swamp of social media with a screenshot and discussion. I was happy to see a Democrat in Congress take the climate crisis seriously, when Congressman Casten shared Zeke Hausfather's Bluesky post (and I do know Dr. Hausfather slightly, and by the way he's a parent too):<br>Some guy replied to the post: "Climate scientists lied to us. They downplayed how bad things are because the feared being called out by deniers. We are completely screwed and there is no stopping it at this point."<br>But they didn't, and that's a sloppy accusation floating around the Internet and Holy Plaid Socks of the Savior, people who were not really listening to extremely alarming statements climate scientists for the past 37 years now want to blame the scientists?<br>"No they didn't. And what we do now matters," I declared. I added a link to a piece from Project Drawdown, a wonderful climate organization focused on sharing solutions whose very name is about this process of drawing carbon down from the atmosphere. The piece is by Dr. Kate Marvel, a climate scientist (and parent) who recently left NASA for Project Drawdown; it's titled "Is climate change unfolding faster and fiercer than scientists expected?" The answer is no.<br>Doomy guy replied with some sketchy science: "There is no stopping it. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years."<br>I replied, "As for the "no stopping it," it is actually possible to go carbon neutral or carbon negative (if not currently likely). Nature, in the form of trees and oceans, among other things, is drawing down carbon dioxide all the time." Were we to actually go carbon negative – i.e. emit less carbon dioxide than nature takes up – we could actually reverse some aspects of climate change. The ice would keep melting, the oceans rising, but other parts of the earth's grand operating systems would stabilize. Obviously we're very, very far from doing that right now, but we do have a wide array of choices about how good or bad the future will be in how we act or fail to act. I think one stumbling block for a lot of people is the idea that if we cannot save everything, we cannot save anything, which is profoundly untrue and seems to arise from the habit of framing everything in all-or-nothing absolutes.<br>The same kind of sloppy thinking made it into Le Monde, which is to France more or less what the New York Times is to the USA ,...