One of the most absurd coinages I have ever come across appeared recently in the New Republic climate vertical “Apocalypse Soon.” “‘Petromasculinity’ Is Becoming Toxic, Too — at Least to Online Daters,’” a March 25 headline “explained.” Apparently, “new generations of Americans are rejecting petromasculinity: the climate denial, authoritarian politics, and sexism that are too often inextricably linked.” In practice, this means that researchers found that broadcasting how much you care about the planet is one of the most popular dating strategies on sites such as OkCupid and Tinder. Users of these sites, particularly women, told pollsters that disagreements over environmental issues were among the most likely to count as a deal-breaker with any prospect.
In short, if you want to do well in the online dating pool, it pays to seem green. And if you want to seem green, today that means exaggerating the scientifically predicted harms posed by climate change. “We’ve got 6-8 years before the climate is so chaotic we live in a permanent state of biblical catastrophe,” Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay recently said.
In an excellent piece countering this sort of thing, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias made a point that needs to be shouted from the rooftops: While people who believe that the entire edifice of climate science is a hoax misunderstand climate science worst of all, the people who think of themselves as the most dedicated enemies of the climate crisis show few signs of knowing anything about actual climate policy or science. Josh Barro, one of the few highly positioned journalists besides Yglesias to stake out the sanity position on climate issues, put it like this: “The histrionics over ‘10 year’ or similar climate deadlines are just marketing.” McKay is not as bad as a congressman who brings a snowball into the House chamber to prove there’s no warming trend, but he’s on the same spectrum. People in this camp don’t know key facts, such as that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that even in the worst likely case of warming over the next 78 years, fewer people will die from extreme weather events in 2100 than did in 1900. Most importantly, they don’t know that this big problem is not an “existential” one, as the name of the group Extinction Rebellion implies or as “Apocalypse Soon” predicts. Nonetheless, the popular thing to do is to traffic in what is sometimes called “doomism.” This trendy (apparently sexy, even) way of being scientifically wrong about climate change is perhaps unsurprising, given how much climate doomism has suffused the conversation around the environment. The “Apocalypse Soon” piece notes a Lancet study that found 45% of young people reported that anxiety over the climate “affected their mental health and ability to cope with day-to-day life.”
Climate journalists and activists are stuck in this mode in which they think they can solve climate change by making themselves miserable enough, which is why all they can do is generate terms such as “petromasculinity,” defined as “a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny,” that can serve as a lens to appreciate “the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule.”
Climate change is a problem that demands seriousness, and as such, it would be nice to have a climate movement that is serious, rather than addicted to Malthusian, apocalyptic nonsense. I wish people whose romantic prospects rely on showing they care about the environment would read the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report more, and “Apocalypse Soon” less, since the two are in fundamental disagreement. As Yglesias notes, “Nothing about climate change is world-ending or unavoidable or beyond the capacity of an individual human being to alter at the margin.”
