I saw this post about an NYT interviewer slowly losing his mind during an interview with Andreas Malm (nominally) about his upcoming book. The footnote to the interviewers “Can you give me a reason to live” stood out to me:

I just blurted this out. I don’t even think Malm’s pessimism is wrong, but I find it suffocating. People need hope.

Well good news for David Marchese - all he needs to do is visit the Guardian for an interview with Hannah Ritchie, author of Not the End of the World. To say there has been a media blitz behind this book is an understatement, and it seems to be part of the genre of climate optimism that exploded in the wake of the IPCC report that put us firmly on the track to 1.5 C earlier last year.

The two interviews are definitely a land of contrasts. Ritchie gets a little bit of pushback on the subject of capitalism:

Guardian: Capitalism has been a great accelerator of climate change and other environmental crises, but you don’t challenge it much in your book. Do you believe capitalism can right its wrongs? Or that it’s the best system to get us out of this mess? Ritchie I accept that there are definitely flaws with capitalism. What I would push back against is the notion that we can just dismantle capitalism and build something else. The core reason is time. We need to be acting on this problem urgently, on a large scale, in the next five to 10 years, and to me it does not seem feasible that we’re going to dismantle the system and build a new one in that time. I think capitalism does drive innovation, which is what we need to create affordable low-carbon technologies.

But both Ritchie and Malm are pushed on the subject of what people should do - Ritchie especially emphasizes that climate change pessimism can damage the individual will to act but largely doesn’t stray from the lane of individual consumer choices (veganism and heat pumps) and the optimism that continued technological progress will make it possible to live sustainably without making large sacrifices in the western standard of living.

Malm notes that he’s not going to confess to industrial sabotage to the NYT, but he also does pass the buck a little, arguing that he’s not in the right place and with the right community to pull off something major, leaving open the question of who is in such a position or how such conditions could arise.

It is without a doubt that 2 C would very much the end of the world for some - Ritchie lives in the UK and Malm in Sweden, both places that should remain petty habitable for a long time, and not Bangladesh, which is going to start experiencing dangerous wet bulb events on the regular by the late 2000’s, if not earlier, or one of the pacific nations that are slipping beneath the rising seas, and that gives Ritchie’s title a glib sheen. To her credit, it seems like she’s still wrestling with the awareness that things aren’t going well, but it seems like she resolves all of her internal conflicts with the observation that things are only bad and can be (or have been) worse.

Overall it just seems to capture how disordered and foggy our thinking is around the large scale changes that need to happen in order to make answering climate change a reality. Both Malm and Ritchie agree that technological solutions exist and are being implemented and just differ on how we should feel about the future. Malm foresees a rocky and militant transition while Ritchie wants a more peaceful meeting of the minds, but how we get either of those outcomes seems to still be a mystery.