Crisis Camouflage

 Jon Chait looks at the failure of the GOP to take climate change seriously and therefore the way it imperils policy, because you don't have the usual push-pull that allows for a wider range of options. The only party offering any solutions to climate change is the Democrats and they have some less than optimal ideas, because every solution comes with tradeoffs that hurt a constituency somewhere.

In particular, he notes environmentalist opposition to nuclear power. This has struck me, too. I get that nuclear power can be catastrophic when it goes wrong, and states that prioritize cheap nuclear power are flirting with disaster, as at Chernobyl and Fukushima. However, if you are serious about de-carbonizing, you need fission reactors. Period. Yet, we see Germany taking their reactors off-line. Why?

The fact is that certain segments of any activist group are wedded to their prior assumptions and goals. An example that briefly overwhelmed rightist media was the idea that Biden will ban beef. He will not. However, animal rights activists are correct when they say that industrial farming of meat is bad for the environment. That's not REALLY why they want to ban beef; they had that position anyway. But the climate crisis is an opportunity to advance their agenda. 

John Kerry, Biden's climate czar, said that technologies don't exist yet that will dramatically help us solve climate change. Think carbon sequestration. If we had a way to pull large quantities of carbon out of the air and store it underground, that could make a huge and immediate impact. It is unlikely to solve the overall issue, but it would be hugely helpful. However, if you see in the climate crisis an opportunity to solve other issues - the malfeasance of multinational petrochemical companies, suburban sprawl, meat eating, unfair labor practices and environmental racism - then a carbon sequestration technology would undermine the urgency of your pet issue.

If you care about climate change, you should be hopeful for large scale carbon sequestration, new forms of nuclear power and/or geoengineering. If you are using the climate crisis to advance a separate agenda (part of the problem with the "Green New Deal.") then you might actively oppose the most promising route to solving the climate crisis.