Tiresia

A good reason would be to get ahead of the bad press and control the narrative. Even something as minor as a bad turn of phrase in an internal e-mail could force them to make a press release early, in that case becaues of the risk of it being stripped of context and leaked to the press by corporate spies or well-meaning whistleblowers in a way that looks way worse than a promise to get around to it later.

Not sure how likely this is compared to it being a fig leaf over cancelling the target altogether.

Whether or not we strive to go back to climate not seen for the past 50 million or even 500 million years, we might end up getting there regardless. Even if we decided today to put all our industry together, we'll still hit double the amount of warming we're experiencing today. If that is extreme enough for a catastrophic feedback loop like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, permafrost outgassing, catastrophic ecosystems collapse in a subcontinent, or all the plankton dying at once because the oceans got too acidic, then even our best efforts can not save us from that reality.

And once we are in that reality, those of us that survive deserve a chance. Even if Antarctica melts and 90% of all human structures ever built are flooded, even if the forests die and global dust swarms blanket the planet until even the tropics are buried in snow, even if no living thing can exist outside a purified climate-controlled space. We, here and now, owe the people living through that our best effort. And that means looking at those futures unflinchingly, determining which are more or less likely and trying to prepare for all those eventualities as best we can.

The time to throw up our hands and say "all of these options are terrible, we should just stop climate change as hard as we can" was twenty years ago. Barring a technological miracle like the Silicon Valley AI God actually saving us from perdition, a billion human deaths would be us getting off easy. We need to prepare for the inevitable catastrophe, because even if a billion humans die, the next billion matter just as much, and the billion after that, and after that, and after that and after that and after that, and after that.

(That said, obviously research shouldn't be used as a smokescreen for delaying carbon emission reduction. It's crystal clear what our politics and our economy need to do if we want to raise the average life expectancy of children born today above 50).

Why do you think it doesn't scale well? The ocean isn't going to run out of water, and Texas being huge only means it's easier to find space for all the solar power you would need.

I'm also curious about what you think the alternative is.

You want to have your cake and eat it too. You pay those corporations to pollute in the process of getting you the things you refuse to live without. You vote for those politicians to enable your consumerism and then blame corruption for the policies they pass to give you what you want. You claim that regular people can't afford the needed changes, yet you insist on eating meat and using cars to get around as if those are free. You claim to want corporations to increase their operating costs to be more sustainable, but you complain about your purchasing power decreasing. You blame corporations for greed, but you insist on a personal electric car because you would rather spend >$50k than learn the difference between walkability and only being traversible on foot.

Not all corporate emissions are for private consumption, but most of them are. Not the whole decrease in personal purchasing power is from decolonization and switching to more sustainable production processes, but a decent chunk of it is. You will have to sacrifice products if you want any hope of a better world.

If there is one ray of hope I can offer you, it is that you seem to have too little faith in the quality of life in a degrowth economy. Modern walkable cities are more pleasant to traverse for more disabled people than car-centric ones, with mobility scooters and public transit chauffeurs. Alternatives to meat are delicious if prepared by a competent cook, and it's easier to get a competent cook to make a fancier meal for you if you share meals with flatmates. Without SpaceX-raised satellites your internet and television connection might be worse, but as you share a meal your human connections can be stronger.

Corporations have spent the past 150+ years permeating every form of media about how necessary it is for you to consume and consume and consume. You don't need their products nearly as much as you think you do, at least in the long term if we work together.

You like forest fires? You monster.

I seriously wonder about the credentials of this psychologist. There are forms of CBT like ACT and other approaches like Prolonged Exposure or EMDR or group therapy that specialize in dealing with anxieties about things that are real, massive, ongoing, and out of someone's control. Things like chronic illnesses in oneself or loved ones, abuse that someone isn't able to escape for financial or social reasons, homelessness, discrimination and bullying, or even just mortality itself.

Climate change is not the first and it won't be the last. Treating it like it is realer than other phobias and special enough to need its own field seems like it's feeding and taking advantage of an actually irrational phobic response.

Honestly, this looks like a grift to sell her book. Maybe a self-delusional one, but a grift nontheless.

That proves too much. Boomers and the Silent Generation are better than people born 50 years before them, because Boomers and the Silent Generation (again, as statistical trends) refused to beat their children and decriminalized interracial marriage and homosexuality. Why wouldn't Millenials be capable of similar moral progress?

Sure, I'm not denying that, but what matters in a democracy and even a corporation isn't the purity of each generation, it's the relative fraction of different groups. Going from 60% petty dictators to 20% is far more important than going from 20% to 0%, especially when it's just one demographic among several.

Empirically, the public loves radicals who engage in violence and disruption. It both moves the overton window in those people's direction and gets support from people frustrated with society but no place to vent it.

Whether it's Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, the Gilets Jaunes, violent farmer protests in the Netherlands, Black Panthers, Suffragette terrorists, labor riots and lynchings of factory owners, the assassination of Shinzo Abe, hell, even Al Qaeda and Hamas. The pattern is always the same: radical and often violent disruptors get a massive amount of sympathy, attention and support while centrists wring their hands about how inappropriate it all is.

If you want to win public support, set something on fire. But if you're offended and scared off by something being set on fire, you're not the target audience yet. They'll get around to winning you over when the movement has grown. Eventually, bringing up that it was bad that things were set on fire will make your friends and family uncomfortable, if they don't outright confront you by saying that it was necessary to overthrow the old ideas. At which point you can re-examine it or retract that part of your politics from the world, forming a seed of conservative confusion and dismay that lies dormant outside the Overton window waiting until someone starts a fire in its name.

The difference is that Millennials seem to be disproportionately tired of responsibility while Boomers hoarded it. What sort of Millennial wants to go through the effort of maintaining a home owners' association or of showing up at town halls to complain about new developments? Just give us some mtg cards and a runescape membership and you can have the White House.

Abrogation of responsibility is still messy selfishness, but it's easier to work around for people who do want to be productive. Those in power are more than old enough that Millennials not replacing them in large enough numbers means reasonably middle-aged Zoomers get those positions instead.

D&D has the metallic dragons and Bahamut. There's also Falkor from The Neverending Story, the How To Train Your Dragon movie series, the titular Dragon Prince, ...

I don't think blocking essential international trade is the way to do this.

Airports are responsible for more frivolous consumption and spread way more public awareness

- you if they had blocked the ports

Look, I can do conservative handwringing too!