On Thursday of last week, Mark Lynas responded to The Guardian's decision to publish excerpts of Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" in a response-piece titled "We must reclaim the climate change debate from the political extremes."
Many readers of Lynas' piece will see an immediate appeal in his argument. Lynas starts off by defining himself as a moderate, thus his subtitle: "Alarmists and deniers need to climb out of their parallel trenches, engage with the developing world and work together to end the crisis." On the one extreme you have deniers such as James Inhofe, and on the other extreme you have anticapitalists such as Naomi Klein, and Lynas wishes to position himself in the middle:
Climate change is real, caused almost entirely by humans, and presents a potentially existential threat to human civilisation. Solving climate change does not mean rolling back capitalism, suspending the free market or stopping economic growth.One reader of this argument concludes that it rests upon a fallacy -- the blogger Dave Cohen, author of "Decline of the Empire," argues that "Lynas starts off with a common fallacy, more formally called the argument to moderation (Latin, argumentum ad temperantiam)." Just because one is a self-defined "moderate" does not mean that one is correct. Moreover, if one wishes to discover the truth, one starts by examining arguments in their own substance, rather than merely characterizing them as implying some sort of appealing or repellent image.
From this conclusion, we would be correct to examine Lynas' arguments to see if they hold water, rather than focusing upon his attempt to grant himself an image as a climate change moderate. A few words on Lynas himself, however, should suffice to define whose argument this is. Most pertinently, sometime in the late zeros Mark Lynas holed himself up in a library and read all of the pertinent research on climate change. The book he produced, Six Degrees, not only built on his previous ethnography of climate change, High Tide, but provided us readers with the most convincing dramatizations of planet Earth as transformed by climate change yet produced. I reviewed Six Degrees here at DailyKos.com back in 2007.
In 2011, Lynas put out a book titled "The God Species," outlining his solution to the climate change problem (which assumes further capitalist growth and relies upon carbon capture, nuclear power, and genetic engineering). Last year, Lynas issued "Nuclear 2.0," a defense of nuclear power in light of climate change.
Lynas'most recent argument will, then, be examined below the fold.