“Whip me, whip me!” said the masochist to the sadist. “No, no!” said the sadist to the masochist. That’s one of my favorite wordy jokes. Another is the unattributed one-liner, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Both jokes speak to the self-destructive dynamic at play in today’s conversation about climate change. To a certain climate-alarmist set, what seems intuitively bad to an ordinary person seems intuitively good, like whippings to a masochist. And what is obviously counterproductive seems like the way forward, like the beatings to the speaker of the one-liner, who is probably not the most emotionally intelligent drill instructor. Deindustrializing the world economy, spending sums that could be put towards other generational challenges, ending animal agriculture, living without internal combustion: Sounds … good?