Phil Aroneanu, Irreplaceable’s executive director and a co-founder of the climate organization 350.org, told me he believes that climate advocates initially floundered because they acted as policy wonks. They thought that making evidence-based arguments about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels to receptive congresspeople would be enough to pass nationwide climate legislation. Today, Aroneanu said, movements are built not necessarily on what people think, but instead on what they feel. For climate, that meant fossil-fuel-divestment campaigns, protesting oil pipelines, and the school strikes led by Greta Thunberg. People are already “feeling the squeeze,” Aroneanu told me. “And we should be pointing that anxiety and that anger in the right direction.”

What is with this attitude of dismissing regular people’s opinions as “feelings” in comparison to their own rationality? This is like those people who would really like to be anti-AI but find it more important to nitpick the water usage numbers and point out how agriculture uses so much more water anyway, in order to form a “better” opposition.

Effective altruism, a name I haven’t heard for a long time.

impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good

Yeah, ignore people when they vote, don’t pay taxes, and let me do whatever I want instead. I wish I could do that, but those guys are so crazy that I know it will never end well.