Great to see a bit more variation in opinions on the show! I think Rupert’s right on a lot of things and definitely coming at the issue with a smarter perspective around building more resilience in our communities and not getting distracted by arbitrary targets. Some of his takes ( such as on AI and nuclear) were pretty awful IMO.
Climate change as a physical phenomenon is very real and measured, and ultimately the result is more volatility in the climate, which means more volatility in weather extremes. At the end of the day that is it. In my perspective it is important to treat as a key issue for the future but it’s perhaps in the top 20 issues amongst many other things, it’s not the dramatic end of civilisation that seems to be creeping in under certain ideological lenses.
It doesn’t mean severe weather events will get worse, there’s more nuance to it. It means that the probability of severe weather events could increase. Severe weather is already a risk and has been for all of our existence. We DO need to improve our resilience to them as a species, same way we improve our livelihood in myriad other ways with technology. As Rupert touched on, the answer is to focus on improving community resilience to all sorts of potential future scenarios, whether that’s increasing local energy security, local food security, local flood resilience etc, but not because of a fear of an abstract future of climate but because it is sensible and beneficial today to do that.
I don’t agree that we should be trying to get rid of fossil fuel sources in favour of wind and solar, I think as a species we should be trying to harness all energy sources as aggressively as possible. Building strong, energy dense, powerful, advanced civilisations will naturally make us more resilient to the impacts of bad floods or changing climate.
Fountain
The Peter McCormack Show • #071 - Rupert Read - Politics Broke the Climate Change Debate • Listen on Fountain
Rupert Read is a philosopher, author, and former Extinction Rebellion spokesperson who now leads the Climate Majority Project—an effort to unite ...
View quoted note →
