Don't Look Up, "The Good Ancestor" & Your Climate Mindset
The newsletter for independent thinkers on carbon and climate.
(source: iHeart)
* MLK Day is Monday, January 17, 2022
Issue No. 105
Welcome to the latest issue of Carbon Creed - a curated newsletter for independent thinkers on carbon and climate.
“Don’t Look Up” shows how divided we are on climate change.
My daughter watched the satire Don’t Look Up last weekend and recommended it to my wife and I for our next Friday movie night. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep, the film is currently playing on Netflix.
Before diving into the movie, I decided to check out a few reviews to get a sense of the storyline. To my surprise the critics were all over the map on this film. The most common complaint was that the mood was too gloomy for a comedic satire. If you haven’t yet seen the film, the following 2 reviews showing the range of opinions might be helpful:
Why Are People So Mad About Don’t Look Up? (The Atlantic)
“Adam McKay’s disaster satire Don’t Look Up is many things at once: a parable of our distracted society, a primal scream of a warning, and a broad comedy from the writer/director of Anchorman. Such a delicate balance has made the star-studded Netflix film a polarizing movie.
Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, and the backlash has highlighted the difficulty of conveying an urgent message with comedy. Has political satire lost its power? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?”
What Is the Worst Film of 2021? (The National Review)
“Don’t Look Up is Netflix’s evasive, misstated excuse for political satire that fails very badly because writer-director Adam McKay doesn’t grasp his own political prejudices. [Unlike Jude,] McKay has no real sense of humor, just sophomoric ridicule. He brazenly broadcasts the entitled sense of obnoxiousness encouraged in Hollywood or Broadway environs, where liberalism has turned into progressivism. And as essayist David Horowitz observed, “inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”
So what is my take after careful diligence of the reviews? A climate movie is the #1 most popular film on the world’s largest streaming platform. Yeah, I’m going to check it out. If you’ve viewed it, why not share you thoughts in the comments box below.
We’ll keep you posted on the latest carbon commentary and market insights as they happen.
If you have an opinion on any topic covered in this newsletter, please feel free to send me an email at mcleodwl@carboncreed.com.
Thank you for your viewpoint and the value of your time.
FORWARDED THIS AND WISH YOU GOT IT EVERY WEEK? YOU CAN! POUND THE BURGUNDY BUTTON BELOW…
NOW, LET’S GO DEEP!
QUOTES
Words that will inspire you…
(source: NYT)
“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
BOOKS
The Good Ancestor
by Roman Krznaric
We live in the age of the tyranny of the now, driven by 24/7 news, the latest tweet, and the buy-now button. With such frenetic short-termism at the root of contemporary crises – from the threats of climate change to the lack of planning for a global pandemic – the call for long-term thinking grows every day. But what is it, has it ever worked, and can we even do it?
In The Good Ancestor, philosopher Roman Krznaric delves into history and the human mind to show that we can. From the pyramids to the WHO, humankind has always had the innate ability to plan for posterity and take action that will resonate for decades, centuries, even millennia to come. If we want to be good ancestors and be remembered well by the generations who follow us, now is the time to recover and enrich this imaginative skill.
To get us orientated to the future, Krznaric lays out six tools for nurturing long-term thinking, each presented in an easily digestible chapter written in pellucid prose. The tools come in pairs, two focused on extending our temporal imaginations, two on caring more deeply about future generations, and a pair for planning more wisely for them.
Given the paralysing despair future gazing can induce, The Good Ancestor is a surprisingly uplifting book. Krznaric is no starry-eyed optimist, and nor does he complacently believe that science and technology will save us from ourselves – indeed, in some cases, these are the source of future concerns. But he is hopeful that we can fix our mistakes, and map out a more sustainable future for the generations to come.
Creed Comments: Krznaric’s The Good Ancestor delves into the ideas and merits behind long-termism, an ideology that is growing in support and popularity as it becomes clearer that our actions today will have long-lasting consequences on the generations of tomorrow.
“What does it mean to be a good ancestor?” Krznaric’s book largely revolves around this question, addressing the vastly interesting and under-explored topic of intergenerational ethics. Our governmental and economic frameworks incentivise short-term prizes over long-term rewards, but that does not mean that we have lost the ability to think long-term. In his immensely profound and impassioned book, Krznaric reminds us that our actions have long-lasting impacts on future generations and the planet. He provides readers with an empowering and eye-opening prescription for a new way to see the world and our place in it, one that recognises how small humans currently alive are relative to the immense breadth of our species’ past and, most importantly, our potentially limitless future.
A suggestion: if you buy a copy for yourself, think about getting another for someone who might not be so inclined. Future generations may thank you.
MINDSET
Why we struggle to act on climate change and science
[This post is adapted from an interview by David Marchese with Neal Stephenson, published in the New York Times Magazine]
Is there a way we could be talking about the climate change story that’s more likely to motivate the kind of mobilization we had during the Second World War?
The difficulty is that it’s hard to get lots of people to change their minds. The United States did mobilize in a massive way during World War II, but we didn’t start getting serious about it until 1942. There had been a huge war raging since 1939, and the Brits were tearing their hair out waiting for the United States to get more involved, and it wasn’t until Pearl Harbor that there was a tipping point in public opinion that made it possible for America’s political leadership to declare war and to enter into it in a serious way. So the question asks itself: What might be a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor? We’re already having little regional Pearl Harbors all over the place. We had our heat dome in Seattle over the summer, we had the mega tornado supercell that passed from Arkansas to Kentucky. These little pinprick Pearl Harbor events happen here and there, but it’s difficult to imagine one that would impact an entire country the size of the United States — if it did, it would be a really bad thing. We don’t want to put ourselves in the position of wishing that something terrible would happen. It’s also natural to assume that the CO2 problem is similar to other air-pollution problems we’ve had before. In the ’50s, there was a disaster in London because of too much coal smoke in the air, and they cleaned up the air by burning less coal. In the ’70s, a lot of the smog problem in L.A. was cleaned up by putting catalytic converters on cars and cutting down on hydrocarbon emissions. There’s a similar story around the ozone hole. We’re accustomed to thinking that all we have to do is stop emitting the pollutant, and then nature will clean up the air. But it’s not true in the case of CO2 in the atmosphere. People confuse CO2 emission reduction or elimination with solving the problem. But even if we could stop emitting all CO2, we’d be stuck for hundreds of thousands of years with extremely elevated CO2 levels that nature has no quick way of removing from the air. That’s the key thing that has to be widely understood before we can actually begin envisioning ways to attack the problem.
Today, many people do not trust or believe in science, especially when applied to covid or climate change. What tensions between old and new ways of thinking are effecting our modes of understanding the world?
I’ve recently been reading, “The Fixation of Belief” by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that people use to decide what they’re going to believe.
1. The first one is called the method of tenacity, which means you decide what you’re going to believe, and you stick to it regardless of logic or evidence.
2. The second method is called the method of authority, where you agree with other people that you’re all going to believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. That’s probably most common throughout history.
3. The third method is called the a priori method, and the idea is, let’s be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to us. Which sounds great, but if it’s not grounded in any fact-checking methodology, then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus — which may be totally wrong.
4. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when you’ve got solid evidence to the contrary.
What we’ve got today is almost everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. We’ve got a lot of authoritarians who can’t be swayed by logic or evidence, but we’ve also got a lot of a priori people who want to be reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings — what they wish were true — and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number.
That’s kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now.
RESOURCES
The Keeling Curve a daily record of global atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Congressional Policy Tracker a summary of current federal energy legislation.
Click Clean your favorite apps and tech company clean power rankings.
Advancing Inclusion Through Clean Energy Jobs a report by the Brookings Institute.
Currents a podcast featuring in-depth discussions with experts on clean energy and sustainability, published by Norton Rose Fulbright.
Matter of Fact, a weekly newsmagazine that focuses on socioeconomic and climate issues in America, hosted by veteran journalist Soledad O'Brien.
IF YOU ARE A SUBSCRIBER, THANK YOU AGAIN, AND PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO A FRIEND!
👋 Questions, comments, advice? Send me an email!