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Jan 11, 2022Liked by Leighton Woodhouse

I've had a similar evolution from good progressive repeating all of the right talking points to disillusioned skeptic.

For me, the seed of skepticism with mainstream narratives began with Black Lives Matter. As a criminal defense lawyer, I have more firsthand knowledge of the world of crime and policing than the average educated liberal (though still less than the average resident of a high crime neighborhood). The cold hard fact is that there is a disproportionate amount of endemic violence in lower income black communities, and this higher baseline level of violence explains the disproportionate rate at which black suspects are killed by police. The BLM narrative denies this reality, and then lies about the facts of the individual cases ("Hands up, don't shoot"). Nonetheless, the media and academia accepted and promoted this narrative with enthusiasm, often using the patently dishonest formulation "Black people account for X% of police killings despite making up only 13% of the population."

By the time of the Floyd killing, I was still uncritically accepting the Covid narrative. I didn't want to put in the time and energy required to "do my own research." I thought Bret Weinstein had lost his bearings when he was still pushing the "debunked" lab leak theory. But then all of a sudden the lab leak was back at the mainstream table. Around the same time (if I recall the timeline correctly), Bret had Kirsch and Malone on his show. Given that it looked like Bret had been right to continue talking about the lab leak, I figure I'd give it a listen. I was skeptical, but as I went deeper down the rabbit hole, more of their claims turned out to have quite a bit of evidentiary support. Moreover, the counter-arguments on the "fact check" sites were obvious hand waving and propaganda. From that point, I radically questioned all of the assumptions I had taken on board in the course of my liberal education.

Climate change alarmism is a tough nut to crack because it all relies on modeling. If there is anything we all should have learned during Covid, it is that models have approximately zero evidentiary value. They mean nothing. Complex systems defy our modeling capabilities. So I have to say at this point I am a climate agnostic. Environmental devastation is an apparent fact, as are steadily rising temperatures (I think?) but the narrative about imminent collapse of the ability of earth to sustain human life (which is all based on the models) is no longer credible to me.

Notably, each of these issues (BLM/equity/social justice, climate change, Covid/pandemics), if we accept the mainstream narratives, demand totalitarian structures to tackle them. It is this desire for power and control that drives these narratives, not the facts. This is why they are so stubbornly resistant to facts and logic. My rule of thumb going forward is: If some supposedly urgent problem calls for a totalitarian solution, we are probably being lied to.

In Don't Look Up (which I haven't watched yet), the solution was technological, not totalitarian, making it a very poor analogy to the contemporary problems we are being urged to worry about and the totalitarian solutions we are being urged to accept. In that respect, it is not only a poor analogy, but amounts to dangerous propaganda. If you do not proclaim that the sky is falling, surrender your rights to the authorities, and demand that others do the same, you are the Joe Six-Pack troglodyte. And who wants to be a Joe Six-Pack troglodyte? Given the alternatives, just call me Joe.

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I always appreciate your pieces, and I mean that in the many senses of the word, but you have outdone yourself. Thank you.

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Leighton - I would add one more grounds to support your catastrophe skepticism. If we were really about to face a climate apocalypse, how can climate advocates insist that we cannot rely on nuclear power to save us? If is true that we will be face to face with an existential threat in 12 years, to paraphrase AOC, how can we have the luxury of picking and choosing the solutions to that existential threat?

Climate change is real, but its causes and impacts are far more complex than we have been led to believe by the MSM. I recommend reading Steven Koonin’s book Unsettled if you want a fairer analysis of what we may be facing and what we can realistically do about it.

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I agree there are reasons to be skeptical of climate change alarmism. It's not that climate change is not occurring, but rather we have the capacity to mitigate and manage change over the long run. I recommend Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never. Climate change alarmism is reminiscent of Paul Ehrlich's influential Population Bomb (1968) predicting widespread famine and death in the wake of explosive population growth.

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I heartily recommend Steven Koonin's Unsettled as an antidote to climate hysteria.

This is the second time I've seen Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife referred to as a fable about climate change (and maybe the author has said as much, I dunno), but I never thought of it that way. The story's McGuffin literally is a copy of Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, which was written well before climate change was a thing (or rather, back in those days, the 1980s, we were all supposed to freeze to death. Plus ça change . . .). The point of Reisner's book is that there isn't enough -- was never enough -- water in the American West to support the populations that live there (here), and the water will run out eventually. Climate had nothing to do with the dire predictions in Cadillac Desert.

BTW, looks like COVID was never as deadly as the media would like us to believe: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.08.21260210v2.full

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founding

We’ve been hearing predictions of climate apocalypse since the ‘70s which never seem to materialize, so skepticism seems warranted on those grounds alone. Further, according to the NOAA, oceans have risen 8-9 inches since 1880 (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level) and yet again here we are, apparently unaffected. We know how to build dikes, why are people so concerned with rising sea levels? We survived the 20th century sea level rise just fine. It seems to me that Thunberg-style environmentalism has a strong millennialist component to it that (a) requires people to ignore any data contrary to the preferred narrative and (b) prevents people from making cost-benefit analyses regarding proposed environmental interventions like switching completely to “green energy” (which may not even be as green as it seems when you consider what it takes to manufacture a solar panel, for example).

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"Unsettled" by Steve Koonin is physical science based written for non scientists and Mike Shellenberger's "Apocalypse Never" focuses more on ecology and species extinction. Both are excellent and should help relieve remaining doubts that skepticism about catastrophic climate change is well warranted.

Also this recent post by Shellenberger is worth a read: https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-democrats-make-energy-expensive?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0Mjg2NTQzLCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0Njg5NDM3MCwiXyI6IlNqQXdrIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQxOTM1NTM0LCJleHAiOjE2NDE5MzkxMzQsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0yNzk0MDAiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.FE4xKNlu0w7bru_wUHlry-gmGG4z-1FblXzyKXU605o

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I love The Thick of It and Dr. Strangelove, another great political satire I'd recommend is Thank You for Smoking if you haven't seen it.

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Love this so much because it articulates something I've been grasping for to write a piece of my own. So thanks for unlocking that

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Thank you for articulating the uneasiness I felt after watching Don’t Look Up. Maybe someone else will make a movie that lambasts both sides.

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