And to be fair, climate change is turned into a crazy red hearing of a political issue. There are lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China, insane amounts of plastic particulates in the oceans, tons and tons of textile waste. There are so many many forms of pollution much worse than CO2, and when you focus on just CO2, you get carbon laws like those enacted in Australia briefly that caused more fuel expenditure in moving ore to China for processing instead of processing it domestically.

There needs to be a huge change in consumption. We need cell phones that last 10 years, not 2~3. We need to end the constant replacement cycle. Intel's shareholders should be glad when sales are below projections because the old chips are lasting longer.

But this is not how our economy or industry works. It's all based about infinite growth, selling you new things, sending your e-waste to Africa to be harvested by kids and be smeltered in recycling shops without OSHA requirements or respirators, sending textile waste to Africa to be sold (but mostly burned), etc. etc.

Until there is a major collapse globally and people recognize the scale of our folly of consumerism and over-consumption, people will not recognize the real changes needed to build a more sustainable world. And reducing overall consumption will also reduce CO2 emissions ... along with all types of other emissions. But it will take reduction. We cannot spend and buy our way out of environmental damage.

Consumerism, over-consumption, and the economic growth these behaviors drive are impossible to eliminate without crippling the global economy. But I think there actually is a way to have our unlimited cake without toasting the planet, it just requires us to divorce the concept of value from physical items (or increase the fidelity, and thus value, of digital items). This is already taking place, with the data economy being the obvious if controversial first step. Similarly, I see the explosion of digital marketplaces and microtransactions within social and mobile gaming platforms as another example of this concept.

There will inevitably be externalities to a shift toward primarily virtual consumption, but I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine compelling virtual products diminishing the draw of many physical item, along with the need for infrastructure to support their production and dissemination.

Then let's ask the question. What are the medium (5-20) years and long (100 years) consequences of such crippling in your view? I am not an economist so any insight from an expert would be good.

Long term... depends? Maybe people figure out a different mechanic to drive growth and re-orient. Maybe people abandon growth as a goal and shift toward a steady-state model (this would be interesting, but would have big global power implications unless every nation signs on). Maybe people suffer for a bit before rediscovering how powerful consumerism is as an economic engine and get back into it for a while until the costs start catching up to them again.

As the foremost expert on "my view", you can depend on these predictions to capture with total accuracy what I believe to be the crippling consequences mentioned earlier.

I'm a bit more pessimistic. Consumerism and over-consumption is an open-eyed march toward doom. Educating (even by collapse) doesn't change the failure to coordinate. When the incentives are structured to trade values for temporary rosperity "The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse." [1]

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

CO2 will end life much faster than any of the other undesirable things you mentioned. It's objectively more dangerous.

> "Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible. World leaders need to marshal all their political and diplomatic might to save it."

So what exactly are you calling out? Better the Atlantic be the one to call out this falsehood, than Fox News. No?

Otherwise, while the article may come out acknowledging climate change, the headline comes across as click-bait that could easily be pushed into a climate-denier narrative. Better to have a more neutral title like "The Amazon's Role in Global Oxygen Production". That stops the facts from being decontextualized.

Because facts aren't usually discussed in isolation. If a climate change denialist were the one to point out the fact, they would frame it with something like: 'Lies the climate establishment are telling you!' If it slows down the process of convincing people of the seriousness of climate change for The Atlantic to report a headline like this, it doesn't slow it down as much as a climate denialist group beating The Atlantic to the punch.

"Better to have a more neutral title like "The Amazon's Role in Global Oxygen Production". That stops the facts from being decontextualized."

Maybe. But the more direct headline helps with the issue listed above. Many (but not all) climate change denialists do not argue in good faith, and it's more important to head off any claim of a cover-up or bias that they might have than to keep the narrative pristine.

Realistically, the alternative to the OP's headline is not something more neutral, but something like this real headline from Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/08/26...

Because if Fox News were to call out this particular falsehood, they may very well sum it up with some bullshit like "and that's why liberals are dumb and we should burn more coal." With the Altantic, we instead have reasonable pleas to remember that climate change is a very serious issue.

As for the matter of the given title: https://twitter.com/PeterBrannen1/status/1166446298897289216

As for who calls out the falsehood, I was thinking more in the vein of "all else being equal", but I suppose you're right and all else wouldn't be equal between the various news sources.

The article opens with this headline which is false: "Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply."

If every living thing was burnt, the planet would cease to resupply oxygen and most of the free oxygen reserves in the atmosphere and oceans would be consumed through geological processes. It would take millennia to complete but its not an outcome which is valid to describe in an educational or truth straightening context as "not a dent".

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 "Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink"

Over what timescale? If you burned every speck of organic matter on the planet, and then you came back in 10,000 years, how much O2 would be in the atmosphere? The article under discussion seems to suggest about 20%.

It's of a piece with the general decline in liberalism of the last 10 years (as another example, take the reputation of free speech as a concept), but I guess what I'm describing is how grotesquely fascinating it is to see a society and its institutions so rapidly lose their connection to basic decency and honesty. I'm not naive enough to think this was some hyperstable equilibrium, but it's fascinating to see how rapidly it happens.

Climate denialism is the proverbial firehose of lies. Finely parsing words to maintain some Panglossian notion of a market dominated by rational choice of information-rich actors is not going to turn us away from disaster.

[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...

Slavish dedication to narrative over truth is putting the cart before the horse: any number of movements that we now remember as grotesque, "alternative facts"-driven impediments to society's progress started out on relatively sound epistemic footing and failed to adapt. The beauty of the scientific method (and the scientific establishment, when it's functioning well) is that it allows us to gracefully transition away from narratives that are increasingly anachronistic or incompatible with our observations.

To go back to your link, consider what defines "propaganda": is it disliking conclusions, or is it indifference towards truth? I'd argue that your link defines it as the latter. For many of us, the conflict isn't between the good set of lies and the bad set of lies, it's between those who intentionally embrace and propagate lies and those who strive for an accurate model of the world. Anyone who's skimmed a history book can tell you that the "good" and "bad" labels don't tend to be very persistent... (the 20th century and it's hundred million dead of utopianism is rich with examples of this).

The author could have focused on expounding the ways in which the metaphor holds to underlying scientifically-verifiable truth, taking asides here and there to correct misinformation. As it's framed, and as the headline emphasizes, that approach is ignored in favor of the “gotcha!” truth-telling that, despite its couple of meager attempts to point out how critical the Amazon is to life on Earth, allows the reader to walk away with the impression that things really aren't as bad as they previously thought, and so maybe they can just ignore the issue or deprioritize it a little but longer. And the skimmer looks at just the headline and is justified in their status quo understanding that there is a climate “debate” with two sides that really should be considered by someone, somewhere.

I've always heard the metaphor accompanied tightly by the claim that it's a significant fraction of the Earth's oxygen production, and denying the metaphor seemed to me to imply nothing further than the refutation of this fact, particularly in light of the first paragraph's strong claims that avoiding deforestation is important. I just don't see why it's critical that he emphasize that point in the firm of holding up the existing metaphor. I read the article (and I think the author intended it) as a pretty classic popular-science case of "here's a common misconception", and as shallow as that may be, it has value.

At any rate, it ounds like we're on roughly the same page overall, and our remaining differences are starting to inch towards pedantry. Thanks for the conversation!

I often think of the election of Donald Trump in this sense...in a way, he is showing us crystal clear how our political dialogue, if not our entire perception of reality, is illusory. Who would have thought that someone could run for president largely on a platform of obvious lies and one-dimensional platitudes? Well, now we know.

And rather than the left being shocked into a higher state of consciousness and considering they may need to rethink their overall political strategy, instead it seems they've essentially decided to double down with more of the same theater. I hoped there would have at least been some serious consideration of a strategy consisting of campaigning on the actual truth (to the best of their ability), rather than just "more true".

So many people, particularly those on the left I would say (the right tends to be in their own little world), think politics is based on a battle of facts, when really it is a battle of memes. It doesn't have to be, but someone righteous has to be allowed to make it through the Democratic primaries if we hope to ever move forward in this respect.

Every time I think I've found the first mover, there's a justification that goes further back. I'm a solid left-liberal, represented most closely by Obama, who discovered through the left's increasing embrace of dishonesty/bigotry/other dirty tactics that his liberal identity was more important than his leftist one. This was years and years before Trump ever entered the scene, and I know people on the right who consider Trump almost as much of a monster as I do, but also consider him to be a necessary fight-fire-with-fire evil against the left's dirty tricks.

And of course, many leftists who embraced illiberalism in that period can reasonably point to something that GWB did as their justification for further weakening norms. And so on and so on ad infinitum.

Anybody with a brain and a history book understands that that's a positive feedback loop that's caused untold amounts of suffering over the course of history, and the social technologies we call liberalism smooth out the tendencies of this cycle to escalate and sublimate the "kill everyone you disagree with" impulses of most of history into progressively gentler forms of resolving conflicting ideas of how the world should be, while still allowing for progress.

That isn't to say that norms and institutions are always sacrosanct and that sharp breaks are never a good idea, but thinking that this started with Trump betrays a misunderstanding of the way these things work and why liberalism exists in the first place.

Yeah but some narratives of the truth can become absurd. And so is this article. The problem right now is not an undersupply of O2 but an oversupply of CO2. In that sense the Amazon is actually part of the earth's lung. Unfortunately the article leaves out the information to which proportion forest contributes as CO2 sink. And also that alternative uses of the area might turn it actually into a CO2 source. That's maybe not intentional but not exactly relevant and therefore misleading.

Right now, when it comes to public opinion and action, volume clearly beats a good signal/noise ratio. This is not an isolated issue, this happens all around the globe. Populism is on the rise. Simple beats true.

Yes, you can argue this is not the way it is supposed to be, but it is how it is. But if you really care about making a change for the better, then this is most definitely not the time for deliberate narratives.

You might have the peoples attention, but not their patience. If you want change, do not squander it.

Nothing matters more than the truth.

When the core of your message is the opposite of that there is no way to phrase it in those terms. You can't join the race to the bottom and get where you need to go.